Cubelogic News

ChessNote Servers Update

Filed under: apps,system-upgrade by Cubelogic — 20130312 0108 Tuesday

The ChessNote servers are now running some updates and optimizations that were long overdue. As a result, your games should load much faster now.

Here’s a more detailed explanation of the changes.

Among the ended games, only the last 50 are returned: this was necessary since some users have a really large number of games and retrieving them all was causing our servers to choke. In the future, a “Load More” option will be added to the app.
Dropped challenges are no longer returned. So, even if you get less ended games, at least you get the interesting ones.
The ended games are now ordered most-recent-first.
A limit on the number of open games has been set. If you are playing 15 games simultaneously, you won’t be able to create a new one. This measure was necessary because some users abuse the “New Game” feature and “spam” other users. Fifteen seems like a reasonable limit (currently, very few users are playing more that 15 games at the same time), but I’m open to increase it a bit if there’s enough demand.

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ChessNote 1.3.5 released!

Filed under: apps by Cubelogic — 20121210 2242 Monday

This was long overdue! This new update of ChessNote adds support for iOS 6 and uses the full screen of the iPhone 5. The Updates tab was revamped, now highlighting the items that need your attention and showing how many hours ago your opponent moved.

We’ve also made it a little easier to invite your friends via email. Simply type in your friend’s email when you create a new game, and if we don’t find it on ChessNote, you’ll be able to quickly send him/her an email invitation.

Sharing your game on Twitter is also easier: ChessNote now uses the accounts you already saved on your phone, so no need to insert Twitter credentials if you already did.

We also fixed some error situations when submitting a move and we made the app smaller so it uses less space on your phone. The user interface looks a little better, too.

Update now!

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ChessNote 1.3.4 is available!

Filed under: apps by Cubelogic — 20120305 2236 Monday

Another ChessNote release, mostly for polishing things up and fixing a few bugs.

This upgrade fixes a problem with repeating of errors after making a move. These errors are often caused by intermittent connectivity of your phone, where the app tries to reach the server but fails because all of a sudden the phone can’t connect to the internet. So we added a way to force a sync-up between your device and the server when that happens before proceeding any further. The app is still fast and responsive, but it’s a little more cautious in these cases.

Partially related, we added a direct non-intrusive way to refresh your user profile if you so desire.

Finally, auto-completion was removed from the email and password fields on the sign-in screen, so if you had problems signing in because your phone was trying to be smart and auto-complete your password… now you’ll be fine!

Download ChessNote 1.3.3 from the App Store!

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ChessNote System Upgrade

Filed under: system-upgrade by Cubelogic — 20120304 1844 Sunday

We are planning a system upgrade for ChessNote today around 8:00 PM PST. ChessNote will be unavailable or have intermittent service for about 1 hour. We will notify you when the upgrade is fully completed. Apologies for the inconvenience.

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ChessNote 1.3.3 available!

Filed under: apps by Cubelogic — 20120215 2132 Wednesday

Download ChessNote 1.3.3 from the App Store!

This new installment of ChessNote is mostly for improved stability. We addressed many error situations, and added a more effective way to recover from them in case they were to happen again. More in detail, if an error happens, now the next time you open that game the app will ensure to fetch the latest version from the server, to ensure consistency.

Moreover, as you can see from the screenshot above, push notifications are now handled also while you are using the app. The moment an opponent moves, the Updates tab will receive a red badge, alerting you of what happened. One more reason to turn on push notifications! (If you had them turned off, you may go to the iPhone Home screen, load the Settings app, go to Notifications and look for ChessNote there.)

However, if you don’t like notifications, we have got you covered as well! We added buttons to manually reload your updates and games.

Finally, accepting or declining a draw is now done on the board screen, not the Game Info screen. This is more intuitive since it is after all an action you must take while studying the board.

As always, happy checkmating! You can download ChessNote here.

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Instant Rematch with ChessNote 1.3.2!

Filed under: apps by Cubelogic — 20111215 2257 Thursday

Download ChessNote 1.3.2 from the App Store!

Version 1.3.2 of ChessNote focuses on user experience and bug fixes. The board screen now has a much more functional organization, using a standard toolbar instead of the geeky right-aligned layout for all the commands. Beside being much easier on the eyes, this makes it a lot easier to browse the moves history, which is something you probably want to do often.

Also, some of you have asked for a rematch feature when a game ends. That would make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it? So, here it is! At the end of each game a pop-up box will ask you whether you want to challenge your opponent one more time. If you do, it’s as easy as tapping “Rematch.” That’s really all there is to it.

Finally, I noticed that the chess-note pane that slides up with each move can be undesired, depending on your mood or astral conjunction: to cater this need, we now have a simple switch to turn that on or off.

That’s it for this release. Thanks again for your support, and happy check-mating!

Download ChessNote 1.3.2 from the App Store!

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ChessNote 1.3.1: send a (chess) note with each move!

Filed under: apps by Cubelogic — 20111203 1345 Saturday

Another incremental update of ChessNote, the simplest app to play correspondence chess on your iPhone or iPod, is available at the App Store.

With ChessNote 1.3.1 you can send a brief message to your opponent every time you make a move, if you feel like it. This is something you could do in the old-school way of playing chess by mail, so it feels natural to have it here. It’s called ChessNote for a reason after all!

On another note (pun intended), we added the ability to see the opponent’s rating on the Game Info screen, a feature that a number of people have requested. Pretty straightforward.

So here it is. Download ChessNote 1.3.1 now!

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ChessNote Scheduled down-time, Sunday Sept. 18 2011

Filed under: apps,system-upgrade by Cubelogic — 20110918 1252 Sunday

Today (Sunday, September 18th, 2011) ChessNote will be down for a couple hours for system upgrade. This is needed for keeping the system reliable and up-to-date. If you experience problems connecting to the servers today, this is the reason.

Service should be coming back online later this evening, approximately around 7pm PST, but hopefully sooner. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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ChessNote 1.3: challenge your friends!

Filed under: apps by Cubelogic — 20110823 2334 Tuesday

The latest release of ChessNote (version 1.3) finally allows you to start a game with your friends. Simply tap on + button on the Games screen, select “by Email”, and type your friend email. Then it’s on!

Remember, your friend (or yourself if you are the one being challenged!) can always decline any challenge by simply going to the Game Info screen.

So, head over to the App Store and update to ChessNote 1.3!

Create a new game on ChessNote, the correspondence chess iPhone app

Decline challenge on ChessNote, the correspondence chess iPhone app

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ChessNote 1.2.2

Filed under: apps,bugs by Ettore — 20110731 2325 Sunday

The new 1.2.2 release of ChessNote focuses again on bug fixes. Among others, we fixed a long standing bug in the Game Info screen, where captures were sometimes mistakenly reported. For instance it was sometimes possible to see 2 black queens captured even if the white player captured only one in the actual game. Please note: this issue never affected gameplay, just the game information screen.

Another issue was the notification badge count (the red number in the App icon), that some users reported as always increasing. That’s now fixed, and it should always reflect the number of games where a move is needed from you.

So, please update now!

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