Chess Book Study v1.5 released

Today was an exciting release. Chess Book Study v1.5 has an interesting ‘Talk to Move’ feature!
Yes, you just speak the move and it will be played on the board! 
If you wish to try, please enable it from the app settings.

What’s new in v1.5

Talk to move! Careful in public, people may think you are crazy. Enable it from the app settings.
How to use


Option to Hide board and read the book in full screen. Especially useful on small screen phones. Now you can read the book commentary without the board getting in the way

Open any Web sites like chesscafe.com, chessbase.com etc and follow the moves on the board. Many of these sites publish games without a javascript board. This makes it difficult to follow, till now!

Paste FEN. Especially useful to copy from websites like chesscafe (they always have a fen string underneath the diagram)

Copy game as PGN. Future versions will have direct PGN Load/Save support. Till then, you can manually Copy the game as PGN using this feature and paste in your favorite program.

Zoom out to upto 50%. User Carl mentioned that some of his PDFs are too big on a 7in screen. Well, Carl, you can now zoom out to 50%

Option to show coordinates! With coordinates on, its easier to follow the moves, especially for newbies.

Takeback/Forward buttons! Yes, yes I know. The existing method was not always intuitive and would also cause false touches. Now, you have dedicated buttons that get out of your way (hide themselves), so that you can just focus on the position!

Minor enhancements and bug fixes – Resize board option has moved to the Settings. Clear Board option is now in the Edit Board popup. Also, “Black Move” option has been added to Edit Board popup which can be enabled if the position you are setting up is with Black to move.

PS. For the above features to work properly, you need to upgrade EBookDroid (customized for Chess Book Study) 
(Talk to Move is an experimental feature and may cause occasional freezes/crashes. If you face problems, please disable the option and report to me 🙂  )

Categories
android ichess

iChess v1.7 released!!

Finally, I am happy to release v1.7 of iChess for Android.

Whats new in this release?
☆ Open puzzles file in PGN format from SDcard! (thanks to user Brandon)
Note that your PGN file should have a move for every puzzle so that iChess can provide you hints or assess your move.
Bird view is also supported!
☆ Added nearly 150 positions from recent GM tournaments played in the last 2 months featuring top GMs like Carlsen, Anand, Kramnik, Aronian, Ivanchuk, Morozevich, Polgar, Svidler, Nakamura etc
☆ Shows game information like White/Black/Event and Date.
☆ Corrected moves for some positions (thanks to user Ulrike)
☆ Added extra moves to positions which previously had only one move

Note: If you are upgrading from v1.6 to v1.7, your Master level (ONLY) Bird view will be reset. Sorry!
This is because of a bug in v1.6 which is now fixed.
Bird view from Normal and Advanced level will be maintained

Categories
android ichess

iChess for Android v1.5 released!!

Proud to announce the release of v1.5.
I consider it to be a major release and hence the version bump from 1.1 to 1.5!!

New Features:

  1. Share puzzle via email/twitter/facebook etc!!
  2. No more boring board color!. You can now choose from Aqua, Blue, Brown, Gray or Green!
  3. Setting to automatically move to next puzzle OR stay on current position and review it
  4. Tablet optimization

Go grab it from the market! http://goo.gl/vK88o