Aart's Blog

It is minor, but the latest release 2.4.3 of Chess for Android now shows a red circle around the king as an in-check (or mate) warning when the move coach is enabled. A sample screenshot is shown below. This version also improves UCI engine unloading on exit.

The adventure that started in Indiana in 1996 and continued in California in 1998 reached a very special point today. I received my U.S. Citizenship. Thanks, America, for being my home for so many years and welcoming me into the American family.

I just released version 2.4.1 of Chess for Android with the following changes: Ability to install application on SD card Moved navigation buttons down Few improvements to UCI engine support To verify that UCI engine support works for third party engines as well (not just for BikJump), I downloaded sources of ZCT0.3.2500 (by Zach Wegner) and Crab1.0Beta (by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski, Adam Kleng) and compiled these "natively" for Android. Importing and playing the engines work fine. As before, instructions on setting up an UCI engine are given at UCI for Android .

Because it is hard to print all information from the UCI engine on the phone screen, I am toying with a feature where the current move considered by the UCI engine is shown graphically. Below is a short demo of this feature. Let me know what you think!

I just released version 2.4 of Chess for Android at the Android Market with the following new feature: basic UCI engine support (ability to replace built-in Java engine with any third party UCI engine compiled "natively" for Android) Instructions on how to setup an UCI engine are given at UCI for Android . As far as I know currently only BikJump is available as stand-alone UCI engine for Android. Although stronger than the built-in engine, I hope I will be able to add links to much stronger third party UCI engines soon. Please note that support is still rather basic (elaborate setup, only tested on one engine, GUI does not support engine options, time control restricted to time-per-move, position sent as FEN, making the engine more prone to three-fold repetition, no tournaments, etc.). Nevertheless, I hope it is an interesting start.