Stockfish Mac app

[zullil]

It's finally here! A beautiful, powerful chess app for the Mac. http://stockfishchess.org/mac/

It looks gorgeous; good luck developing it further. But I'm switching to a linux workstation. Really disappointed with the CPU options in the new Mac Pro. $4000 for 6 cores? I'll be getting 16 physical cores for $5000.

Louis, I think you should take more time before switching, and take a look at the reviews. I've watched today a two-hours long review of the Mac Pro (in french), and they said two things that surprised me (and surprised them as well) :
1 - the Mac Pro is upgradable : you can replace nearly all its parts : memory, SSD, CPU (some people even replaced the CPU, as it's not soldered on the board), and the GPUs are on daughter boards which Apple said would be regularly upgraded by them and opened to third party constructors.
2 - If you compare its price with the equivalents from HP and Lenovo (with the same configurations and components) you get a Mac that is noticeably cheaper than the equivalent PC (something very surprising from Apple). They quoted several websites, including AnandTech:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac- ... -late-2013

Also, Mavericks makes a perfect use of the GPUs with OpenCL (ok, not useful for chess). They were extremely impressed by the powerhouse this new MacPro is. The professional movies editors who tested it said they were rendering 4K movies in real time while applying numerous effects. Again, not chess, but it shows how powerful this thing is. You could buy the cheapest one and upgrade its CPU, for instance.

Now you do what you want, and you switch to a PC box if you want to, but don't do it out of poor informations.

My Dell T5610 arrived yesterday. Dual 8-core xeons at 2.6 GHz. Wiped Windows and installed elementaryOS (a pretty Ubuntu-based OS). Getting 21M nps from Stockfish, without even tweaking to optimize.

This is my employer-supplied work machine. I considered the new Mac Pro carefully before switching. Yes, it's upgradeable, but for now you have to get just one cpu and two gpus. The code I use for my research needs cpu cores, not over-the-top graphics. And, like chess, OpenCL won't help me much.

Lost a lot of faith in OS X after using 10.7. I'm told 10.8 and 10.9 are better, but I stayed with 10.6 Snow Leopard wherever I could.

[daylen]

It's finally here! A beautiful, powerful chess app for the Mac. http://stockfishchess.org/mac/

If you have a Mac running OS X 10.9 or later, I think you should check it out, and if you would like to, I welcome pull requests!

Can you build this to run on earlier versions of OS X? In any case, you ought to be clear on your website that the current app is Mavericks only.

Oops. I'm don't think I'm using any OS X 10.9-only features, so it probably should work on 10.7-10.8 too if compiled for those OSes. In any case, Mavericks is a free upgrade for 10.6-10.8 users.

But some folks have Macs that can't run 10.8 or 10.9. I'm using such a machine right now. A 2007 white macbook stuck on 10.7.

Stockfish for Mac compiles for 10.8 and 10.9, compiles with warnings for 10.7, and flat out does not compile for 10.6. You can clone the source from GitHub, change the deployment target to your desired OS version, and build it; however, I won't be providing binaries because there's no automatic update mechanism besides the Mac App Store in the app, so people would be stuck with older versions if they didn't know how to do it themselves. Added benefit: if you build from source now, I've added piece drag-and-drop and arrows on the board indicating the best move.

[Kaj Soderberg]

Thank you, Daylen.

Keep up the good work!
Kaj