Celebrating the holiday season, the Internet Chess Club (ICC) offers its recently launched app for free, until December 31st. The app has had several updates since last August, including live transmission of (top) tournament games, lag compensation (time stamp) and iOS4 multi-tasking.

The Internet Chess Club (ICC) launched its app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad on August 19th of this year. Since then the popular online chess club, with over 30,000 active members (amongst them many super grandmasters), allows you to play and observe games with a native appplication on Apple's iDecives.

The first release offered a mixture of online and offline features. One can play rated or unrated games at the ICC over Wifi and 3G on the iPhone. One can also observe games being played, and chat with other observers. Besides, there's an in-built computer engine to play against. After playing the games are stored, and one can replay previously played games.

Updates

In the meantime several updates of the app have been released. The features now include:

• Live transmission. You can now follow top tournaments live and chat along through your phone.
• Contact list. You can create a list of your friends on ICC, whom you can easily challenge for a game.
• After a game you can easily add you opponent to your contact list and rechallenge him or her.
• Auto-email PGN. It does what it says: your phone can automatically send your played games in PGN to your email address.
• Lag compensation. They've added a time-stamp to the moves sent to the server which is then used to compensate for any delay in communicating with the server. This means no more odd behavior of the clock, lost games on time without knowing, etc.
• Lag indicator. A circle next to the username indicates the amount of lag (delay) your connection is experiencing with the server. Green means your connection is good, yellow means your connection is average, and red means you have severe lag.
• iOS4 multi tasking. If your phone rings during a game, the game is simply put on stand-by, not forfeited as used to be.
• Last moves played. The last four moves of your game are now displayed. A quick and easy convenience located below the chess board.
• Move confirmation. Since most newcomers struggle at first with moving the pieces, there's now the option to have a move confirmation. It's on by default.

The ICC app on the iPhone turned out pretty handy at the Grand Slam Masters Final in Bilbao, during the heroic ending between Alexei Shirov (with queen) and Magnus Carlsen (with three minor pieces)

Free till December 31st

Celebrating the holiday season, ICC offers the app for free until the end of the year - the normal price for the ICC iPhone app is US $0.99 or EUR 0.79.

ICC is developing for more platforms, including Android, and their iPhone programmer is preparing an iPad version as well. Customers can expect more in the first quarter of 2011.

Links

• Demo of the ICC iPhone app
• Get the ICC app (iTunes)