[HN Gopher] Turn your phone or tablet into a chess clock
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Turn your phone or tablet into a chess clock
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 30 points
Date : 2024-11-01 15:10 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (akkartik.itch.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (akkartik.itch.io)
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I use Chess Clock
| (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chess.cloc...)
| to play with my children - does the job, simple to use, free
| akkartik wrote:
| This seems pretty decent. It's 1) by a reputable site, 2) says
| it doesn't collect any data, 3) doesn't share any data with
| third parties. Only criticism I have is that 4) it's
| proprietary and liable to stop working on new devices if the
| for-profit company funding it loses interest in it. Whereas OP
| depends on an open source project with very different
| incentives (won't lose interest; someone with interest will
| fork it; but on the other hand it's not going to be arsed to go
| through painful app store review. You'll need to download and
| run the raw apk. For as long as Android phones owned by an ad
| company allow that.)
|
| Still, 3/4 is pretty good!
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Now you made me want to write a PWA for a chess clock... This
| is not really nice of you, I already have a pile of things I
| plan to do and my wife is looking weird at me because I am
| typing at the computer instead of fixing the dinner as I said
| I would do :)
| akkartik wrote:
| Excellent! :D
|
| To be fair, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42034577
| does have a very nice option.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Ah yes, it is already done. Thanks a lot for the pointer!
|
| It's a shake it is not open sourced, the commands are
| indeed too close to the clock
| j_leboulanger wrote:
| I use lichess as a chess clock, works like a charm
| akkartik wrote:
| The native app or website? Does the app have a clock tool? I
| use lichess a lot, but only on the web, and I haven't seen a
| chess clock on the website. (I'm the author of OP.)
| nilsherzig wrote:
| At least the beta android app has one
| fph wrote:
| I have seen people play 5-0 games on the board at my university;
| my phone would not survive one day of play.
| qsort wrote:
| (Sorry for the OT mini-speech)
|
| I don't really like 0 increment games OTB. Online it's fine and
| you could argue that time management is part of the game, but
| on a physical board you end up knocking down pieces and having
| a lot of arguments about whether moves were legal or not.
|
| 5 minutes became popular when digital clocks were rare and
| expensive, but these days a digital clock that does Fischer
| increment is like $50. 3 minutes + 2 seconds is about the same
| length as 5 minutes and much better suited to OTB play IMO.
| akkartik wrote:
| Totally valid criticism. I'm not competing with specialized
| chess clock devices used in professional settings, only chess
| clock apps on mobile devices that people use in more informal
| settings.
| ryandv wrote:
| I think this is more a comment on how hard people slam
| physical clock devices after they've made their move, not
| about the feature set of any given chess clock solution.
| akkartik wrote:
| Ah. I thought it was a comment on battery life. LOVE is
| definitely not the most power-efficient way to run code on
| a mobile device.
| naet wrote:
| I have played a ton of 3 min flat blitz games at the local bar
| using my phone as a click and my phone has never been broken,
| maybe due to a little good luck. Not as satisfying to tap the
| screen compared to slamming a button on a physical clock, but
| nobody has ever slammed the phone like that even if they've
| been drinking.
|
| Seen plenty of liquids spilled on the board though so there is
| always that hazard...
| dataspun wrote:
| A nice option: https://chessclock.org/
| tacone wrote:
| I love it, but it looks too easy to reset the time by mistake.
| styczen wrote:
| please add go clock to (additional time)
| akkartik wrote:
| I'm the author, but I don't follow your comment. Could you
| elaborate?
| sugarkjube wrote:
| Google byo yomi
| akkartik wrote:
| Ohh, you mean a clock for the game Go (wei qi, baduk)
|
| Sure thing, that should be doable.
| akkartik wrote:
| Author here. The point of posts on this devlog is to show ways in
| which you can replace a bunch of different specialized,
| proprietary mobile apps of dubious provenance with a single
| general, reputable open source app (LOVE running my carousel.love
| file, which is a cross-platform zip file containing all source
| code and live-editable on a computer).
|
| If you have a favorite chess clock product you use, and it has
| any niceties or features that cause you to favor it over this
| little thing made with 100 lines of code, I'd love to hear about
| them. I want this thing to be a real product that competes with
| real products on mobile devices, but that can also stabilize and
| become a durable artifact that doesn't require funding or a
| business underlying it. I don't have the product/UX chops to do
| this, but it has time since it'll never run out of money. So all
| we all have to do is spend 10 years polishing and refining it
| without adding too many features :)
| mafuyu wrote:
| Carousel looks neat! I haven't played around with Lua or LOVE
| much, but this reminds me of Processing, except with more of a
| focus on creating useful mini-apps instead of visual art. It
| also reminds me SmileBASIC for the Nintendo 3DS.
|
| What would distributing this for iOS look like? I guess it
| would be publishable on the App Store, since there are apps
| like Pythonista out there?
| akkartik wrote:
| You can run LOVE on iOS:
| https://www.love2d.org/wiki/Getting_Started#iOS
|
| You "just" need XCode, and to recompile it once a year. Sigh,
| ugh.
|
| I believe there are third parties distributing it on iOS as
| well. But then you need to trust an additional entity.
| naet wrote:
| The Lichess app has had a built in clock that works very well
| and has all the time settings you would want. You can find it
| in the menu under the analysis board. I think a lot of people
| don't know that it's included even if they use Lichess.
|
| Been using that for at least five years when I need a phone
| based chess clock on the go. I didn't try yours, but it has all
| the options for stuff like increments, handicap, stages, etc.
| tzs wrote:
| Does the environment you wrote it in support networking? If so
| an interesting option would be two have it run on two phones.
| Each phone would show both times.
|
| This would have two advantages over other phone chess clock
| apps I've seen.
|
| 1. Convenient placement. Each player could have their phone
| where it is most convenient for them instead of it having to be
| in the usual place on the side of the board.
|
| 2. Others have brought up the concern that people might hit the
| phone too hard after their move. In a time scramble people do
| sometimes hit pretty hard because they are trying to hit it as
| fast as possible. Also, they don't always hit it with
| relatively soft flesh. They often hit it with the bottom of the
| piece they just captured. Imagine what repeated hits to the
| phone from pieces from a tournament sized triple weighted set
| could do.
|
| If each player is hitting their own phone they might be more
| careful.
| eesmith wrote:
| Back in the 1980s, I would write a BASIC program on my PC to be a
| chess clock.
|
| I think I wrote it anew each time? It was really easy to do.
| akkartik wrote:
| Yes! That is the world I want to bring back. No package manager
| and whatnot, just copy paste code from a website and keep
| going.
|
| (I'm ok with not having to type it in every time. Though you're
| welcome to do that if you like.)
| eesmith wrote:
| I probably wrote it anew each time because I wanted to try
| something different.
|
| Or, in modern speak, it was a code kata.
|
| I did the same when I needed to memorize a word list for
| Spanish class.
| tzs wrote:
| I can think of two main reasons for a phone chess clock.
|
| 1. To paraphrase what is said about cameras, the best chess clock
| is the one that you have with you. People usually have their
| phone with them, so should the need arise to have a chess clock
| they are covered. Not many people want to always carry a physical
| chess clock around just in case the opportunity to play chess
| arises.
|
| 2. It is cheap or free. The _phone_ is expensive but people are
| going to have that anyway so that doesn 't count. A decent chess
| clock from a known company will probably run you are least $30.
|
| For people whose main reason for a phone clock is #2 and would
| not have a problem with having to carry something with them I've
| always thought it would be interesting to make some sort of
| holder that you can put a phone in when using it as a chess
| clock.
|
| The holder could hold the phone at a better viewing angle, and
| could incorporate some sort of rocker mechanism so that the phone
| tilts slightly to one side or the other. The app on the phone
| could sense which side the tilt is toward and use that to know
| which clock should be running. (The app could also correct the
| display for the tilt so the display remains level despite the
| clock body being tilted).
|
| When you move instead of having to hit something on the touch
| screen you'd hit your side of the top of the holder to flip the
| tilt.
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