Spent this week making improvements to the Chess Viewer that I released for Everyman Chess a few weeks ago. It was good to spend some time re-factoring an app that I actually started building about a year ago.

Monday was largely spent redoing the code for the “ChessBoardView” to use Core Animation Layers. I had to make some quite fundamental changes so that I could track the movement of the pieces but at the end of it I had a board that shows nice animations as pieces move around and are taken, and also added the ability to flip the board around to see if it from the point of view of the black player.

On Tuesday I added a feature to prompt the user of the app to review the app on the app store. Lots of apps have started doing this but I couldn’t find a simple small library to implement this, so I did it myself. The code for MKEReviewRequester is now available on Github, there’s some instructions in the README file but it’s fairly simple. Set some variables when the app launches, call a method every time a significant app action occurs (an ebook is read or a game is played) and then call another method at the point you want to display the alert to users. The code was all based around some code I found on this blog post, I just wrapped it together into a nice simple class.

Got lots more done on the app too but have run into a problem with preparing Ad-Hoc builds on my Xcode4 install so annoyingly I can’t show the updates to the client. Need to check whether I can distribute a different app and also try my old laptop, hopefully one of those will work.

Today (Friday) I’ve finally managed to get the memory usage on one of my Arduino projects down so that it fits within the 2K of RAM provided. I should hopefully be writing up some build notes on that with more details shortly.