Tag: iPhone

Review: Chess Studio for iOS

Apple likes to tout its iPad Pro and similar devices as laptop replacements. A few years ago I wouldn’t have entertained such a notion, but these days I’m doing more and more of my work and play on my iPad. In fact, my Macbook has been in a box for sale on Ebay for the past few months. My lower-budget Windows laptops tend to compliment my iPad device just as well. While Chessbase remains a staple of my chess database management, a new program has readily taken over much of my annotation and chess management work on the go: Chess Studio.

Full-Featured Chess Manager

Chess Studio proclaims itself to be the first program for iPhone and iPad to effectively manage portable game notation (PGN) files and I wholeheartedly agree. I’ve been using it for years and it’s hard for me to believe that I haven’t taken the time to write a review. So, here we go…

Replaying a game in Chess Studio. (Credit: Campfire Chess)

Chess Studio is obviously the brainchild of someone who loves chess and is equally as frustrated as I am with the lack of effective chess utilities on mobile devices. Once a PGN file is imported, it can be sorted, appended, and edited in an almost endless variety of ways. For me, this makes it an ideal application to use as a companion for reading electronic publications like Chess Life or the growing library of chess books available on Amazon’s Kindle.

Reading Chess Life alongside Chess Studio (Credit: US Chess/Campfire Chess)

As you can see from the image above, it works extremely well for playing through PGN games while reading the annotated publication. The ability to quickly add new variations, delete variations, add annotations, and make comments to games puts Chess Studio light years ahead of anything else currently available. The board is well designed with several color scheme options and chess fonts. There’s also an extensive settings panel that lets you show/hide coordinates, change some of the board’s basic behavior such as legal moves, and font size.

Adding annotations in Chess Studio. (Credit: Campfire Chess)

Note: My #1 issue with Chess Studio is the yellow background on the move list. I sent the developer a request to let users change that option and he assured me in a response that the option to change that color is coming in the future.

Capitalizing on New Tech

As I’ve mentioned in reviews for several new products including ChessNoteR, I love that chess tends to drive advancements in technology or unique utilizations of existing tech. Chess Studio is a nice program, but what really makes it a powerful utility is its integration with the rest of the Apple iOS ecosystem.

Accessing a PGN file from another app. (Credit: Campfire Chess)

The image above shows how Chess Studio integrates itself into the shared items menu throughout iOS. PGN files detected by the operating system are provided an option to copy themselves directly into the program. That’s how I access files from The Week in Chess and Chess Life. This makes it nearly effortless to import files into Chess Studio.

Final Verdict

Chess Studio is an excellent program for chess players and enthusiasts on the go. It’s well-supported and under continued development, unlike many of the programs rotting away on the Apple Store and Google Play. Well worth the purchase!

Watch Chess App Brings Grandmasters to Your Wrist

I love discovering new chess apps and web services! Recently as I was looking for new (and useful) apps to install on my Apple Watch I came across a cool little app called Watch Chess (FacebookTwitter | iTunes). Mainly searching for an app to display chess games or maybe even lucky enough to play a chess game on my watch, I was blown away by the functionality of this little gem and knew that I had to offer it a short review!

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The app’s home page is simple and intuitive with a colorful list of available broadcasts. Clicking on the tournament image brings up a list of rounds for that tournament that include dates and easy select for kibitzing the game of your choice. The interface is mirrored on the Apple Watch with the only difference being the absence of the colorful tournament buttons. Each board is clear and easy to read on the Apple Watch just as it is on the iPhone. Although some people might be turned off by the lack of an engine interface, that is no reason to stop most users from enjoying the app’s presentation of high-level chess.

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Watch Chess is one of the few apps out there that offer full support for the Apple Watch. While some people still consider it to be a novelty, the Apple Watch is growing as a tool to supplement people who use iPhone or other Apple products. The app works as well as any other Apple Watch app with custom notifications and the ability to use the digital crown to scroll through archived games. Unfortunately, this means that the app also suffers from some of the watch’s setbacks including some slow load times for games. Apple has promised to fix these problems by moving more of the operating system on to the device itself with the coming release of watchOS 3 this fall.

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