fling wrote on 02/26/13 at 09:47:38:


Still nothing, I have to say I am a bit disappointed. Too bad, I really like e-books because I can bring more books with me that way, and also have more space at home!

I tried out Forward Chess. I do like it. Intriguingly, they state that it is a "collaboration  of several chess publishers." The samples so far are from Chess Stars and Mongoose Press. Perhaps other publishers are on board or will come aboard in the near future.

Thanks for that info.

But what I really meant to ask was: Is there a way to emulate an iPad on a PC, analogous to "Kindle for PC"? I haven't bothered with buying an iPad or even a smartphone yet.

Stigma wrote on 02/24/13 at 16:33:11:


I mainly use a  PC; my most useful took for "serious" chess work has been, and remains, Chessbase, plus various engines. 

I also use the PC version of Kindle, since more and more chess books are gradually becoming available in Kindle format. I also use a real Kindle for travel.

However, recently I acquired an IPad and have started looking for and at chess apps. I would regard these in all cases as inessential but in some cases as very nice to have. Some are also undeniably quite useful IMHO but none so far come close to Chessbase for what I mainly want to do: basically personal study using databases and engines and production of regular coaching materials (annotated games, puzzle positions, notes on various chess topics). 

So far my impression is that the typical chess concept for IPad is a "reader" app that is free, but with content available that needs to be paid for, which can be done easily and fairly cheaply in most cases via ITunes..

These are the IPad apps I've looked at so far:

Chess Viewer: a pgn reader, which for instance enables the pgn versions of Everyman e-books to be read on an IPad

CB Online - another pgn reader with some database functions; considering this comes from Chessbase, I find it rather disappointing in its functionality, but perhaps I'm missing something.

e+Chess Books - a program to read chess e-books with the neat facility to play through the moves on a handy board - very nice, but with only a few, slightly oddly chosen, titles so far available for purchase.

ChessApps - very similar to e+Chess Books - the ebooks available so far are mainly in Spanish. This one is also available for PC though.

ChessU is a bit unusual; it's based on purchasable courses (openings, great players, endgames) with questions and answers to work through.

A more traditional "Fritz" type program is the quite nice IPad version of Hiarcs.

As you would expect, the seemingly thriving websites chess.com and ICC have decent free IPad apps that allow you to access pretty much the same web content as on a PC.

There's also a nice Kindle app for IPad.

I hope this is informative.

This looks quite similar to the e+ chess app, but without as many features, yet.
Certainly worth downloading.

Chess Stars publishing goes into the future with a new aplication for Ipad users with 3 e-books (Safest Grunfeld, Sharpest Sicilian and Modern Reti). Anyone have any views on this?
http://www.chess-stars.com/Forwardchess.html

Can we use an engine?