Why Not ChessCube?

As you read through this blog, you might notice that I'm not so fond of Chesscube.



You know why? Because it's so full of Flash. And you know what Steve Jobs has to say about Flash:

• It is proprietary;


• It has security problems and is the number one cause for Mac crashes;


• Flash is a battery hog which doesn’t work well with mobile devices;


• Use HTML5 instead.

And if you have kept up with the news lately, Adobe has removed Flash for Android from Google Play.

Now, have you seen a Chesscube app in the iTunes App Store or Google Play? There's none, because they can't do it.

That's why I'm using an internet chess server like FICS for online play and Chess.com for correspondence chess.

Raptor is a Great FICS Desktop Client for Mac

Free Internet Chess Server (FICS), which can be found at www.freechess.org, is a great way to play chess online for free. Besides being free, another great thing about FICS is the presence of a huge community, so that you'll always have someone within your playing level to start a game with. It is also highly moderated by system and human moderators so that trolls and cheaters are quickly identified and acted upon accordingly.

I used to connect to FICS via Winboard or BabasChess on my Windows machine. But now that I'm on a Mac (specifically on an Intel, Mac OS X Lion 10.7, Macbook Pro 13" Early 2011), these two programs don't just seem to work. Good thing I stumbled upon a comment from one user in the FICS group in Facebook about Raptor Chess.



So when I did install it, it was actually like BabasChess for Mac. So thanks to the developers of this program, now I can enjoy playing at FICS natively on my Mac.

Mac Desktop Client for FICS

UPDATE: I actually already found a great FICS client for Mac: Raptor Chess.

If you have have read in my previous post, I've been a Mac convert for sometime now. And I would like very much to test the computing power of a Mac upto its full potential.

I also liked playing chess on FICS or freechess.org. And I have been looking for Apps or programs that can be a desktop client for connecting to FICS. In my Windows days, my favorite was Winboard, though I sometimes used BabasChess.