Aart's Blog

Several folks who use Chess for Android to play against another human have requested a feature to auto rotate pieces towards the side to move, so that they can use the phone or tablet as a chess board without constantly having to pass the device around. I have added this feature and also made cautious steps towards some animation in the application. The following clip shows the results. Expect this feature in an update soon. Comments welcome. Auto Rotation Clip

Version 2.6 of Chess for Android adds some choices of board colors and piece sets. To change, press menu, then options, and select either board color or piece set. This brings up another dialog with the choices in colors or piece sets.

I got a couple of requests to improve the graphics in Chess for Android, especially now that tablets are becoming more widespread. I found a public domain chess piece set that looks nice and increased the resolution of the wood texture (really just a picture of my coffee table!). I also added a few more board colors. This is how it looks now (click for the full resolution picture). And this is how it may look soon (again click for the full resolution picture). Comments welcome, of course.

Version 2.5.5 of Chess for Android introduces the following new features. Ability to save games to SD card. Games are appended in PGN format to file  /sdcard/games.pgn  on the SD card, so that users can examine these later, for example, in a chess application on the desktop. Ability to define common UCI engine options in a pop-up window: hash table size ELO strength restriction  endgame tablebases formats (Nalimov, Gaviota, or Scorpio) and cache size The options are populated with the engine's defaults.

Version 2.5.1 of Chess for Android simplifies installing third party UCI engines quite a bit. Most importantly, it is no longer required to install the Android SDK in order to push binaries to the Android device. Instead, UCI engines can simply be copied to the SD card and, from there, installed into internal memory. A few important links: Updated instructions on installing UCI engines Chess for Android manual   List of UCI engines that can be imported   A big thank you to Michel Van den Bergh for inspiring me to simplify the installation process in Chess for Android!