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
I'm also wondering if it's an automatic classification. Wouldn't expect that on HN, but the posts in there are so random that it almost must be.
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
Yeah , that's fair. More than promotion i was trying to suggest i had also built something similar and kind of understand the product space. It's this dev thing, can't shake it off i guess. But i get what you meant.
Apart from that i have a theory that there is a lot of ML based ranking and classification that is happening at the backend.
CT-ART 4.0 is the gold standard. Again, not fully free, but it has some very instructional features, like playing against alternate moves, solving mini versions of a puzzle, playing the opposite side etc. Used it for years.
This is a nice app, but I have one bug report: When I tap on a piece, and it can capture another piece, it looks like it just can't move that way. Capturable pieces should have their background change somehow, to indicate that I can capture them.
Yeah, that’s more me being lazy than an actual bug. I left it like that assuming most people would figure it out anyway — but you’re right, it’s bad design. I’ll add a border around the "capturable" pieces.
Thanks, it left me a bit baffled the first time, as it seemed to say I can't capture the piece, when I knew I could. I tried anyway, and it worked, but it was confusing.
1. I enabled them by default because I thought most people won't even know about their existence if they weren't there but if someone is bothered by them they will definitely find the menu item and disable it.
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.
Thanks for your feedback, In the upcoming update I will...
1. add a toggle to disable sounds.
2. add an option to enable auto advance in future update.
The app is full screen on my Samsung mobile so your bottom navigation is underneath the onscreen Android navigation and unusable. Happy to submit an issue and screenshots if you have a GitHub repo.
I'm really sorry about your experience. Could you please let me know your device name and screen size? I will make sure to fix this, along with any other bugs people report here and push an update to the app stores by tonight.
TacticsMaster on F-Droid also says it has 100k puzzles, sourced from https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles, though that says it has 5 million puzzles, so perhaps 100k is just a coincidence, a nice number, or maybe of the 5m there's a nice subset.
> 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.
Not OP but generating puzzles isn’t hard if you have a database of games and I’ve done it myself.
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)
Is it the animation of the piece moving? I’ve tested it on a bunch of iOS devices and haven’t noticed anything odd, but I’d love to take a closer look. If you can, please share a video or GIF. It’ll really help. You can email it to me at [email protected]. Thanks for trying my app out and giving feedback.
It takes both yours and puzzle's rating in consideration while calculating. Just below the chessboard you can see "+12 -10" that means this puzzle will gain you 12 points if you solve this or you will lose 10 points if you fail.
Nice, bought to replace 'chess tactics puzzles' the addition of rating changes sold me.
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.
great app, I like the adaptive style, but one piece of feedback is that, sometimes it is not clear what the goal is. For example, the language "Brilliant queen win ahead!" tells me, right, I am going to checkmate for the win with the queen in this game. But, actually the puzzle is to instead win the queen piece. "win" in chess to me always means checkmate.
I will change the confusing wording like this but for now I can tell you this, if it mentions a piece by name then the puzzle is about winning that piece and not the game. Thank you for trying the app out.
Can you please explain what it means? I have been using HN for years and only seeing this for the first time. Seems like some mod action but searching on google didn't return anything.
This looks really cool! I can't remember what article I was reading the other day but it was advocating for local first software as being the true goal of creating user friendly software -> this app absolutely meet's that goal. Looking forwards to using it.
Nice app. Using moto edge 60 pro. The app navigation gets hidden under the phone navigation icons. I'd like to pay. Except without user login, I am unable to figure out if the purchase can be linkedin to my 2-3 devices (each of which may use a different Google account)
Thanks! A couple of other people in this thread have mentioned that bug too and I'll get it fixed ASAP.
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.
> There's no login required since the app uses Google Play Billing
...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
For what it's worth, the entire Lichess corpus of puzzles (over five million positions with solutions and theming tags) is available for download in CSV format at https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles
Very cool app. Chess.com costs too much and lichess is rather ugly and has barebones puzzle support. I like how you can choose different categories. Will be using this from now on.
Btw you have "Egnlish Opening" misspelled.
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
``` 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
- it plays sound even when my (iOS) device is muted
- would love an option to automatically go to next puzzle
Other than that, it is working nicely so far.
https://imgz.org/ibGDKfuf/
> 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)
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
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.
Overall great app.
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.
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.
...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
I like the feature because it updates my rank when I get internet restored. I just wish they cached more than 50 offline.