Information, Please: Chess for i-Junk?

I'm considering getting an iPod Touch and want to know if there is ANY chess program with a halfway decent engine that will save analysis done on it. Years and years ago I had a Pocket PC and it could do it with ease with Pocket Fritz 2, but according to a friend of mine with an iPhone there is no program written for the i-market that lets you do it. (Unbelievable if true.) Does anyone know of such a program? (A further near-requirement is that it can export the saved game and its analysis to a PGN file you can copy to your traditional computer.)

Comments

[Adrian Petrescu]

Hi Dennis,

The "Shredder for iPhone" app does what you want; it runs the Shredder engine, which is quite strong. It can do analysis, play against you, or just get out of the way and let you record a game. It can e-mail you the completed PGN once you're done.

Unfortunately it's not free; I think it was around $8 when I bought it, which is still quite reasonable. I enjoy using it.

Cheers,
Adrian

[Dennis Monokroussos]

But can you save the analysis?

[Nate Criss]

Unfortunately Shredder does not allow you to enter annotations or alternate lines. I do not know of an iPhone app that does let you do either unfortunately. Apple platforms have been ignored by the three most popular chess vendors for a very long time. I write an e-mail annually to the most famous one and I always get back an e-mail telling me that they have no plans to support the Mac natively. The good news is the most popular chess server supposedly has an iPhone/iPod client in beta. But they have said that they have a Mac client in the works for the last two years and have never delivered so I'm not going to hold my breath.

I have heard tell of Alexander Shabalov using a Remote Desktop program to access his desktop PC from his iPhone and use his analysis tools that way. I haven't used it for chess, but I have used a remote desktop program on the iPad to do other tasks and it is passable. The downside is with an iPod touch you will always have to be near a wifi signal to use this option.

The iPad would be an amazing platform for chess analysis, the large(r) screen could have multiple boards and you could enter moves and analysis very quickly with gestures. Here is hoping that one of the major players takes advantage of the market soon.

[Kajetan Wandowicz]

Not surprised here; those things are made to look good and be stylish, not to actually do something useful, right?

[Monkeymind]

Shredder should work for you. On a side note, magnuschess is great for online playing with ipod touch/iphone .. it connects to FICS and has a great UI.

[Dennis Monokroussos]

I was a little unclear in the post. What I'm asking about is if there's a program that lets you store alternative lines. Let's say I have the game X vs. Y in a database in the program, and want to analyze the opening. Working on the analysis, I find some neat idea and want to save it. Can I do that? Or, going in the opposite direction, can I import games that have analysis?