International Correspondence Chess Master

At the recent ICCF congress in Järvenpää, Finland, I received the title of International Correspondence Chess Master.

International Chess Live for Windows Phone

I just published my first application for a phone, International Chess Live on the Windows Phone 7 market place. International Chess Live allows you to watch live chess on your Windows phone.

The live coverage is brought to you by my good friend Mark Crowther for The Week In Chess and the London Chess Centre.

If you already have a Windows phone, you can download International Chess Live here.

Here are some screenshots:

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More surface development

I have been contracting with syzygy on several Microsoft Surface projects. For Fujifilm we developed a multi touch photobook application, which was shown at Photokina 2010:

I developed the photobook interaction, and the algorithms for automated layout.

Mobile chess survey

Chess friends have asked me time and again about having versions of my chess software on various mobile devices.

This includes my Silverlight chess board, which is used for live transmission of chess games, and to replay chess games which can include annotations and variations, and my work for the ICCF and on Xfcc to access correspondence chess games.

To get an estimate on how big this interest is, I created an online survey on mobile chess.

Website update

Just updated the website. Moved the blog to a custom domain, as blogger no longer supports FTP publishing. Included the Xfcc and Silverlight chess board content under the same header. Thanks to Kirsten for the header.

WP7: Silverlight in the browser?

I am really excited about Windows Phone 7 series and have already installed the development tools. One question that was raised at the Mix conference this week was whether Silverlight applications are supported in the browser.

Mary-Jo Foley received the following answer from Microsoft:

“In its first release, the Windows Phone browser does not support a browser plug-in model. We are evaluating this for future releases of Windows Phone […]”

However, when I pointed the browser built in the emulator to my Silverlight chess board, I was able to take the following screenshot. The UI of the emulator was flickering, and I wasn’t able to use the UI, but a plug-in model must be there, I think:

Aquarium to support Xfcc

Xfcc is the standard for web services for correspondence chess, which I invented back in 2003, when web services were the latest and hottest technology.

Chessbase, the biggest vendor of chess software, has been supporting Xfcc since Chessbase 10.

Now the second biggest vendor of chess software, ChessOK, is set to implement Xfcc in its Aquarium software.

An article at Chesscafe has all the details. I am impressed with their idea of linking the analysis in your local database with the games on the server.