As it was not clear from the description, there's a one-time payment (4.29€) to get more than 7 puzzles in a day.
Lichess also offers a good alternative to this, although their offline support is limited.
You are limited to 50 puzzles when off the network, and when you reconnect, the next 50 (or the delta between how many you played and 50) are redownloaded.
Maybe he's really good at chess?
(Unlike my former co-worker who would monopolize the one men's room stall for two hours at a stretch doing chess puzzles on his phone, and I'd have to go to the IT building. Gross.)
Overall great app.
See chessbook for an app that does this really well.
It'd be nice to be able go back to a previous puzzle (back button? For me I think I've only wanted one level of "history"), I've occasionally misclicked the next puzzle button when I want to think a little more about why other variations weren't correct.
Another feature that would be nice would be the ability to see my win/loss stats per category so I could know what I should work on. I suspect there are some categories I'm just bad at, but without just trying them all I can't easily figure out which those are on adaptive (and I think concerted practice on the section I'm bad at would help me a lot). Both overall and last n Puzzles would be helpful (can have a hard coded n if you don't want to store all win/loss history - 100?)
Oh and maybe one more request on that last theme. Maybe being able to have checkboxes to include/exclude things in the "adaptive" set, so if I'm doing well at some things I can manually exclude them (now maybe adaptive already does this, but it'd be nice to be able to tweak it myself)
Ok, one more. Being able to see the tags associated with a puzzle after you've finished would help me too. (I.e. puzzle I just did was opening, Caro-Kann, Fork)
I like the feature because it updates my rank when I get internet restored. I just wish they cached more than 50 offline.
- Text hints should probably be off by default, they give too much of a hint.
- Auto-advance to next puzzle would be helpful, clicking “next puzzle” gets tiresome.
- Typo in the puzzle categories list: “Egnlish Opening”
2. I will add an option to enable auto advance in future update.
3. That typo is embarrassing — thanks for catching it! There’s always something that slips through.
I went to find the setting (independently of this message, I'd prefer it off by default, but seems fine either way) and I actually can't open the menu, which I assume is the three dots I can see in the top of my phone. It appears to be behind my notification bar?
The Offchess text in the top left is behind my phone's clock as well. Maybe just some padding is needed?
Android 15, Nothing phone 2 if it matters. Message me if you'd like more details.
Glad I saw the comment about it being paid so I could get to the purchase screen before I lost internet. (As a side note, it says "Buy now for $3.99" but it's really $5.99 in my currency. Not sure if you can make the button match to the price in the locale)
* Ability to continue and play solved puzzles till the end by exporting to an external chess app using FEN or PNG
* Bookmark interesting games to come back and maybe solve again (with no points)
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chess-puzzles-world-champions/...
> Generating these chess puzzles took more than 100 years of CPU time.
The page includes a link to the puzzle generator and tagger for interests sake.
For each game just fast forward to the end and ask for Stockfish to provide the solution. If it’s guaranteed “mate in X” then you’ve got yourself a puzzle. You can have a classifier that grabs other puzzle types too (“win the queen in X” for example)
https://raymondsmullyan.com/books/the-chess-mysteries-of-the...
I have only used OffChess briefly but one feature request I have is to remove the possible path of the piece when clicking on it (like Lichess).
Another improvement would be the placement of the “next puzzle” button, that seems to be in a crowded place.
There's no login required since the app uses Google Play Billing on Android and App Store billing on iOS. That also means purchases are tied to the Google account used to buy the app, so unfortunately they can't be shared across different accounts.
I hate the annoyance of apps forcing you to create an account before you even try them and that's exactly why I kept it simple and login-free. But yeah, the trade-off is stuff like what you pointed out. To balance that, I made it a one-time low-cost purchase instead of a subscription. Hope that makes it fair.
I don't have hand-to-hand experience with Google Play, but quite a few of those billing platforms offer "discount codes." So to help the GP commenter, I would imagine they could email you from their purchasing Google account and ask for 100% off codes for their other Google account addresses
I don't know how to help the sibling comment, short of you just straight-up making them a custom .apk without Play Billing. FWIW, it's actually absolutely painless to host your own f-droid repository <https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver#what-is-f-droid-serve...>. It's marked AGPL but despite its name one doesn't need to run that package to host a repo, just $($HOMEBREW_PREFIX/bin/fdroid update --verbose --create-metadata -W error) and then $(rsync -Pav --delete ./repo/ your-awesome-host:/repo/)
It's so painless you could even do that per user, as in lucb1e-fdroid.example.com or lucb1e-a6d7c104-e9b1-4ddc-ad5a-470e51bb5069.example.com
...so it requires logging in with a Google account. That means I won't be able to buy the app on my phone
A one-time purchase for an offline privacy-friendly app is 100% fair and the price point and free tier seem great to me (someone upthread said it's like 4.7€ if you want more than 7 puzzles per day iirc), but please just add an option to send you money directly via e.g. IBAN. It's one of the few privacy-friendly options and you also get to keep all of the money
Most other options cut people out: paypal doesn't work half the time ("sorry, something went wrong" when the algorithm hates you today), stripe has issues when your bank and residence country don't match, credit card requires a good credit score, etc. It's all data- and algorithm-based, whereas banks are legally obliged to give you a functional account because it underpins so much of society nowadays. I'd be happy to pay for the app even without using it as a way to add my 'two cents' and hopefully make this more worth your time
almost certainly implies it's not a technical hurdle that they're facing. Plus, purchasing would require giving Google payment details, which would necessarily include billing address, and now it's tied to your phone. I could very easily imagine that giving a lot of folks a lot of heartburn
You also can't log into this app specifically, it will tie all apps on your device to this one account. Nobody should be doing this, it's like logging into the Chrome browser and tying all pages that have any sort of google service on it (embedded map, youtube, analytics, ads) to the phone number and thus identity you signed up with
What happened, from memory:
1. Tap piece at original location
2. Tap piece at destination
3. Piece animation commences
4. Piece animation finishes
5. Move sound occurs
Everything was smooth except there was an approximately half second delay (may have been less) between 2 and 3.
- it plays sound even when my (iOS) device is muted
- would love an option to automatically go to next puzzle
Chess.com doesn't offer this option, so would be a neat differentiator :)
you should update the "Why" in your original post to tell the truth. this is about making $
yuk.
i.e. just show the piece, not the piece and where to put it?
I was wondering -- how does the point-based rating system work?
The system is based on ELO with the main difference being that the K factor in OffChess is variable, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
Trying to get a feel for the rating system.
Too late did I notice that there is no share fen button. I use that for harder puzzles when I want to understand why a given solution wouldn't work. Mostly just share to Chessis.
.... As I doubt you thought them all up yourself. You may want to attribute your non-derivative assets.
Other than that, it is working nicely so far.
For that you will have to wait for the next minor update.
Looks cool. On Android the UI seems to extend below the status bar at the top and below the drawer at the bottom of the screen which creates some overlapping though.
It says "stub for offtopicness" but, skimming them, literally all comments are on-topic. Not all substantial ('very nice app', 'whats the tech stack?') but a lot of other comments are a normal amount of substantial and also in there... I don't get it, but note that you can expand that subthread
We've recently had some threads about new product announcements in which the thread quickly fills up with "booster" comments from new accounts or old/dormant accounts that come back to life just to post these comments. The "stub" is a way to hide those comments without penalizing/hiding the main thread and the product it's about.
We were getting some emails and comments suggesting that this was happening here too, so I started trying to address it by moving some comments into the stub, intending to spend more time figuring out which ones were authentic and which ones seemed inorganic, but was slow to get back to it.
I think in this case, most or even all of the comments are actually organic or authentic; people just really love a good chess app!
Sorry for the confusion!
By "booster" comments we just mean comments that are highly positive but low on substance. "Great app!". "Congrats on the launch!". Comments like that are often an indication that a friendship network has been rallied to show public support and create "social proof". But often these kinds of commenters try to get clever and add in Dorothy Dixer questions about the tech stack or something else to make the comment seem more authentic and substantive, and enable more details to be shared.
Often when that happens, it's green (new) accounts or old/dormant accounts posting the comments and upvoting the thread, but there wasn't much of that here (though there was a little, which is what aroused suspicion).
But these comments don't have any effect on the thread's ranking. It's only a vibes effect.
``` Hi ,Congrats on the launch. I built a free iOS app also which has chess puzzles.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/knighty-chess-puzzles/id674524...
Would appreciate feedback. ```
Not sure if that's why it was moved to `stub for off topicness`. I wonder if it is some kind of categorisation logic based on text.
As for that specific comment, to be fair, I could actually understand: promoting your own product in someone else's thread without really saying anything at all about the submission (topic) that was posted could be seen as off-topic. I don't really mind it (I don't think I voted on it), but I could see a human also classify it that way
Apart from that i have a theory that there is a lot of ML based ranking and classification that is happening at the backend.
There are other comments which are clearly on-topic, e.g. direct feedback about the app, which have been relegated to this weird sub-thread.
If this is a new feature, I’m not a fan of it. We have downvotes for off-topicness.
I built a free iOS app also which has chess puzzles.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/knighty-chess-puzzles/id674524...
Would appreciate feedback.