This is the chrss (chess by rss) blog.
About two months ago I posted a screencast of a new feature, that would be arriving soon. Well I've been a little busy, but have finally managed to get enough time together to finish the feature off and make it available to everyone.
So now you will see an "allow undo" button next to your opponents move. This can be used to offer your opponent a chance to take back their move. It's very much self-policing and at the end of the day you don't have to let anyone undo a move if you don't want to. However I'm sure everyone has had the odd game where a silly mistake has cut short an otherwise enjoyable game.
As I said in the previous post I (personally) have had this feature enabled on my account for a little while. I noticed quite a few little issues and usability quirks (e.g. how do you know when your opponent is offering you a chance to undo a move?), which I've spent a bit more time sorting out now.
So hopefully everyone will find this feature (at least occasionally) useful. Let me know if you have any suggestions on how to improve it (or feedback in general).
John (aka lilspikey)
I've just uploaded a new version of chrss. The new features are as follows:
Now the last feature is a pretty big one, so I'm being cautious about it. Being able to undo a move in a game of chess has many implications. I know some players will find that this breaks the whole idea of J'Adoube (the touch-move rule), but also others will find it useful to avoid ruining an otherwise good game.
As chrss is not a competitive site, I think that the ability to undo a move will be a boon. Often when playing a game of chess against a friend you might offer them the chance to take a move back. e.g. if it would clearly end the game early. This sort of decision is shared by both of the players and requires both of their consent.
Therefore to undo a move in chrss it works like this:
If Player 2 decides to make a move before Player 1 undoes their move then the "allow undo" will be cancelled.
At the moment though the "allow undo" button is only available to the admin account. I've done this just to make sure that everything works ok. I've done a fair bit of testing, but as undo allows the board to change out of sequence I want to make sure there aren't any unintended consequences, before rolling this out to everyone. Hopefully that will be in the next couple of weeks.
So if you are playing a game against me you can ask to undo a move if you suddenly realize you've made a foolish error!
Another minor update.
Firstly there are now better 404 and error pages. Previously they were fairly unfriendly server error styles pages. Now they look like they belong to the site. Not a major thing at all, but it's been bugging me since I started chrss two years ago.
The real thing of interest though is that I've added an extra style sheet for iPhone (and in principle Android) users. It simply tweaks the main style sheet to make the site work a bit better on the iPhone's small screen (relative to a desktop/laptop at least). This means that the chess board for a game should be nice and big on the iPhone's screen so you can see what's going on.
The one minor caveat though is that I've only tested this on the iPhone simulator (I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to phones). However as it's only making small changes it should work ok.
So hopefully for the few people currently using an iPhone to access chrss their user experience will now be a good deal better.
Another few small changes:
The feed on the front page is useful, because it is sorted in date order. Newer moves and comments are at the top.
The stats page is a concession towards everyone's competitive urges. I've toyed with the idea of a site-wide leader board, but that'd encourage a lot more (over-)competitiveness and thus cheating. Sticking with the "friendly game of chess" approach I'm keen to avoid such problems. However it's always fun to be a little competitive with your friends, so being able to track your games seemed like a reasonable compromise.
As you can see from my stats page I'm only winning about a third of my games. So now you know I'm not joking when I say on my profile page that I'm "not that good at chess"!
I've just made a small change to your games list. It used to be that once a game finished it would disappear straight away from the "active" list and go to the "finished" list. Sometimes though you haven't had a chance to review the game and possibly leave a friendly comment. So now instead of this, finished games will stay on the active list for two days after the game has finished, which should be ample time.
Only a small change, but hopefully the start of a few more. I'd planned to do a fair bit on chrss over the holidays, but got sidetracked by the 5K App.
Just a quick post to say that the mobile version of chrss now works properly with the Nokia 6300 built-in browser. This happens to be the phone I have and it's very much a phone (not a web-browsing device), so the mobile version is mostly for when I'm not at a computer and want to check my games and maybe make a move. I'd been using Opera Mini to access the mobile version before, but hadn't quite figured out why the native browser wasn't working.
For those who might want to know of one of the quirks of this browser (and it will be more or less the same for similar Nokia Series 40 phones) it appears that if you issue a (302) redirect after a post request then the browser re-posts the data to the redirect URL. So in chrss when logging in it was doing this:
POST login info (user and pwd) to /mob/login
302 Redirect sent to go to /mob/ after info confirmed
POST login info (user and pwd) to /mob/
Whereas a regular browser would do this:
POST login info (user and pwd) to /mob/login
302 Redirect sent to go to /mob/ after info confirmed
GET /mob/
As this meant there were some unexpected parameters Turbogears was throwing an exception. As a workaround I've changed my mobile login code to remove the user and pwd params before they cause any trouble.
In the end a simple fix, but as always testing things out an a real phone make things take a good while longer than I'd like.
I've just added a new feature - you can now leave yourself notes about your games. The notes are private, so you'll be the only person who can see them. That's obviously quite handy if you're writing down your tactics and don't want your opponent to read them too!
To add notes to a game simply click the orange and white "notes" button (below the board next to RSS, PGN, FEN and diagram) and a text area will slide out. You can then type your notes into this area and hit "save notes". When you want to see your notes again just hit the "notes" button. The notes are hidden by default, cutting down on clutter and keeping them away from prying eyes.
It's a pretty simple feature, but hopefully handy, particularly if you have several games on the go.
I've got around to improving the look of the dashboard widget for OS X. Previously it was a bit flat:
After a bit of work in photoshop it now looks a bit more at home on OS X and generally a bit more "3D":
As well as this purely cosmetic work, I have also changed the widget's behaviour when you enter the name of an unknown user. The old widget would simply show an error icon. The new widget will show a message saying the user is unknown and provide a link to the signup page. So for those who haven't yet created an account for chrss the widget should be a lot more helpful in getting you going.
Oh and there was also a small bug fix - the link to chrss.co.uk on the back of the widget should now work.
You can download the new widget (version 1.1) here.
For those of you who have several games on the go and get tired off switching between games I've added a little shortcut.
When you've got games to move in, you can hover over the number shown to get an ajax-style drop-down list of all games it's your turn in. So if you've got a few moves to make you can move between games without having to always go back to your main games page.
Hopefully this will work in a fairly unobtrusive manner - it shouldn't affect anything else and if you've got javascript turned off it'll still work as before.
This also represents the start of a simple API for Chrss. The javascript for this makes a background call to a URL that looks like:
http://chrss.co.uk/user/USERNAME/active.json
Which returns some JSON representing the list of all active games for that user. The exact details of the JSON I'll leave for now, as it may change before the API is ready. However it will largely be the same, so feel free to have a poke around.
It should make a good basis for widgets in the future. With more information available (beyond just a number) the widgets can hopefully be a bit more interactive too.
I've also got the "remember me" feature working when you login/signup via OpenID.