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Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

Author here. The point of posts on this devlog is to show ways in which you can replace a bunch of different specialized, proprietary mobile apps of dubious provenance with a single general, reputable open source app (LÖVE running my carousel.love file, which is a cross-platform zip file containing all source code and live-editable on a computer).

If you have a favorite chess clock product you use, and it has any niceties or features that cause you to favor it over this little thing made with 100 lines of code, I'd love to hear about them. I want this thing to be a real product that competes with real products on mobile devices, but that can also stabilize and become a durable artifact that doesn't require funding or a business underlying it. I don't have the product/UX chops to do this, but it has time since it'll never run out of money. So all we all have to do is spend 10 years polishing and refining it without adding too many features :)

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The Lichess app has had a built in clock that works very well and has all the time settings you would want. You can find it in the menu under the analysis board. I think a lot of people don't know that it's included even if they use Lichess.

Been using that for at least five years when I need a phone based chess clock on the go. I didn't try yours, but it has all the options for stuff like increments, handicap, stages, etc.

Does the environment you wrote it in support networking? If so an interesting option would be two have it run on two phones. Each phone would show both times.

This would have two advantages over other phone chess clock apps I've seen.

1. Convenient placement. Each player could have their phone where it is most convenient for them instead of it having to be in the usual place on the side of the board.

2. Others have brought up the concern that people might hit the phone too hard after their move. In a time scramble people do sometimes hit pretty hard because they are trying to hit it as fast as possible. Also, they don't always hit it with relatively soft flesh. They often hit it with the bottom of the piece they just captured. Imagine what repeated hits to the phone from pieces from a tournament sized triple weighted set could do.

If each player is hitting their own phone they might be more careful.

Really good points. LÖVE doesn't support https yet (that's coming in the next version) but for this I think pure http should suffice. I'm going to try to put this together with a tiny server shim to forward messages to each other. That way it should be robust to firewalls and so on.

Carousel looks neat! I haven’t played around with Lua or LÖVE much, but this reminds me of Processing, except with more of a focus on creating useful mini-apps instead of visual art. It also reminds me SmileBASIC for the Nintendo 3DS.

What would distributing this for iOS look like? I guess it would be publishable on the App Store, since there are apps like Pythonista out there?

You can run LÖVE on iOS: https://www.love2d.org/wiki/Getting_Started#iOS

You "just" need XCode, and to recompile it once a year. Sigh, ugh.

I believe there are third parties distributing it on iOS as well. But then you need to trust an additional entity.

Gotcha, thanks! I'm not in the Apple Developer Program, but I'm tempted to do it just to be able to experiment with sideloading all sorts of LÖVE programs.

<3!

there is https://github.com/ldeso/blitz which looks quite nice

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