Chess Insight new app for Mac

[MikeB]

The new version of Chess Insight 1.43 is available guys.

I am still working on the next major update that should include an "Auto analyze" feature. If you have the ideas related to this area or any good examples like chess.com computer analyze or lecheass.org computer analyze (these are very well known, but might be you dislike anything there) ... you are very welcome to suggest. On this stage, I decided to include the amount of good, bad, casual moves etc ... chart with advantage during the game, PV suggestion for mistakes and blunders ...

This is very early screenshot of the right sidebar in "Auto Analyze" mode
https://www.screencast.com/t/m2auQqW7aw

Can we plug in our own Mac binaries of UCI engines - Komodo,SF-McB etc?

[juicesharp]

Hi Michael.

Unfortunately, that is impossible. Mac AppStore sandbox policy prevents to run executables outside of the dedicated application folder, even if the user explicitly selects it over Open File Panel. In theory, I can embed any free engine like Crafty etc into the app bundle, and provide an ability to select that from the list, but this is impractical in my point of view as there is only one free engine can compete with Komodo and Houdini in quality of game analyze and that one has already embedded.

The other opportunity to make that possible is to sell the app out of Apple Mac Store (as result avoid any Apple's sandbox limitation), but it will involve an extra development related to the licenses and keys management and setting up the store infrastructure, at least now I can't afford that by time. Might be if app sales grow 20x times and I will be in a position to dedicate myself to full-time work on the project.

Thanks for your interest!

[adams161]

went to buy it figured i'd try it and got "Chess Insight can’t be installed on “Macintosh HD” because OS X version 10.12 or later is required". I'll probably update my Mac OS, its good to get around to that sort of thing, but I'm on 10.11 right now and was it necessary to limit the app to only the current OS? I've developed some iOS apps and it's typically not necessary to do that but sometimes you need something that is only available on the latest OS.

// edit i found this https://www.gosquared.com/global/mac/sierra/#beta sierra only has 56% of the mac os market share or traffic per this site right now.

[juicesharp]

Good point, Michael. I will check that and if anything requires 10.12 I will publish the next version to the store without such restriction.

Thanks, again.

[adams161]

cool i did and edit with this web link https://www.gosquared.com/global/mac/sierra/#beta as you can see go back a few versions on the OS and you can get your potential market up to 90% or so not 56% which it is now. There typically is not anything that needs the latest OS unless you used something really cutting edge. You can also make frameworks optional in x-code and simply not run a function or feature if you detect an OS that is to low.

[juicesharp]

I checked the code - 10.11 is possible out of the box 10.10 will require some small fallback for text measure function.

[adams161]

one thing you can do to check is google your frameworks and some of your code style for example some string functions with for example ios were not avaiable till ios 8 etc. If you see people using it years ago in stack overflow answers then no worries. If you make a mistake you'll get a crash report and be able to fix it. You may want to incrementally go back and not go to far to quick. But going back one or two OS's probably most everything that is commonly used is often the same.

[MikeB]

Hi Michael.

Unfortunately, that is impossible. Mac AppStore sandbox policy prevents to run executables outside of the dedicated application folder, even if the user explicitly selects it over Open File Panel. In theory, I can embed any free engine like Crafty etc into the app bundle, and provide an ability to select that from the list, but this is impractical in my point of view as there is only one free engine can compete with Komodo and Houdini in quality of game analyze and that one has already embedded.

The other opportunity to make that possible is to sell the app out of Apple Mac Store (as result avoid any Apple's sandbox limitation), but it will involve an extra development related to the licenses and keys management and setting up the store infrastructure, at least now I can't afford that by time. Might be if app sales grow 20x times and I will be in a position to dedicate myself to full-time work on the project.

Thanks for your interest!

I'm confused , I have successfully replaced the Stockfish engine in the Stockfish engine app and the Stockfish app performed (admittly it been a while and the Stockfish app in macOS store is strictly used for analysis and not game play. This is was done by right clicking the app >Shown Package Contents > MacOS > Stockfish - anyway the ApplenStore policy is dumb and you should also offer another app on webpage - with a slightly different name where use can install their UCI engine of choice - similar to shredder and Hiarcs Explorer - your Apple Store app is tailored for the newbie , your webpage app is tailored for the long in the tooth chess engine geeks like me. Your web page app will sell more to this crowd here than the Apple Store app - I even came up with the name for your webpage app - Chess Freedom - freedom to use any uci engine you want. You can price it slightly higher , and keep more of the revenue for yourself . $29.95 is a price I would py for your app - but I would also want eng vs eng capability, engine tournament mode and a gauntlet mode - Arena probably has the best app feature set for what old guys like me want - but it's not available for Mac and if you make as good as Arena , you would have a hit - there is nothing like for the Mac - xboard has some of that - but it's not in Arena's class. Sorry but I can't buy your Apple Store app locked into one static engine.

[adams161]

That was one of the reasons i tried to buy it. I was curious if i could swap in a new engine by simply replacing the existing engine in the package contents with a new one of same name and if it would work. I suspected it would which means the app could let people open engines if they are smart enough to figure out how to add it to the package contents.

I can understand the appeal of selling through the app store for a developer who is doing it more as a hobby and not full time. Apple manages the payments, keeps some stats for you, and provides built in marketing. There is also a whole new set of work in trying to support running outside the app store.

I respect this developer decision but he may want to look into if he could let people open engines they place in the package contents. As a developer myself i know often things evolve over time and sometimes its better to start off simpler.

[juicesharp]

I respect and appreciate your opinion, Michael.

Might be one day I will sell that out of the Mac Store...

Please notice If I want to have the Arena for the Mac I would write the Arena's clone for the Mac, and (un)fortunately am not a chess-engine geek who run engines battles on his machine and organizes endless engine tournaments for the fan.

I am just a software developer who likes play chess in the local chess club himself and really wanted to have something nice looking, functional (in my point of view), natively running on my Macbook to organize the games and the chess books I owned (that's why I spend plenty of time on such a small and unusual thing as a custom cover support for created databases, might be this is not so important for someone else, and PGN Viewer looks so nice and the reason of that - I read a lot of chess books as result I had paid attention to fonts and their sizes and ability to change them proportionally, paid attention to general move notation layout and even allowed to change the brightness of it to provide a pleasant reading experience to my eye in the night), to help me to analyze and annotate the games I played, and all of those without jumping from Mac to Parallels to run over killing Chessbase/Fritz or jumping between pgn files in the modest looking ChessX.

Something cool like a swiss-knife