I’m going to explain this more when I write the help docs, but I want to put up a quick post about how to use the color picker.

The color picker works via Hue, Saturation, and Lightness sliders.

The Hue slider is the rainbow.  Drag the target to the color you want.

The Saturation slider determines how colorful or gray the image is.  To make the color really saturated, slide it to the right.  To turn it gray, slide it all the way to the left.

The Lightness slider determines the brightness of the color.  Slide it to the right to move the color closer to white.  Slider it left to move the color closer to black.

Remember this:

The color will be black if the lightness slider is all the way to the left.  It does not matter what the other sliders are set at.

The color will be white if the lightness slider is all the way to the right.  It does not matter what the other sliders are at.

The color will be a shade of gray if the saturation slider is all the way to the left. It does not matter what the other sliders are at.

I find HSI sliders to be easier than RGB (Red/Green/Blue_ sliders, because once you get the Hue you want, you can subtley adjust the brightness and saturation easily.

ChessUp has been updated in a big way. In fact, I’d say that over half the code was re-written. But enough technical details…what’s new?

Drag And Drop. Pieces are placed by dragging and dropping them onto the board. To remove a piece from the board, drag it off.

Color Choices. Users now have 100% control over the board, text, and background colors.

Piece Styles. There are now 4 different sets that can be chosen for pieces. They are all fairly similar, but the color scheme is different. The old Wikipedia graphics are gone. (They were nice, but they were blended with the backgrounds, which made it impossible to add the color-chooser).

Board Coordinates. A new detail is available: board coordinates. Toggling them on will show the traditional algebraic coordinates along the left and bottom sides of the board.

ChessUp requires JavaScript to be enabled in order to work. Cookies are not required, but they are recommended. Enabling cookies will allow ChessUp to remember the last board position and color choices you submitted. This makes it easy to hit the “Back” button and do little edits without starting from scratch.

The next big “To Do” is to add some context-sensitive help.

OK, enough talk. Here are some quick example images I put together to show off the new flexibility.

The new release is imminent. The color picker and drag ‘n drop are working, and images can be created from positions. Oh, there’s another new option that some of you might like, but I’ll leave that as a surprise.

All I have to do now is make the descriptive text work again. I’d like to be smarter about how that works, but in reality, I’ll probably just release it with the old functionality and then improve it over time.

I hope to have the new content out by Sunday night.

This blog has always had an RSS feed, but I linked to it incorrectly.  This made it hard for browsers to discover the feed.  Well, I just fixed that.  If you’re using Firefox, you should see the little orange “RSS” icon in the address bar.  Other news readers should have an easier time finding the RSS link as well.

In other news, the GUI updates are coming along quite nicely.  Drag N’ Drop is working, and the color picker is almost done.  Barring any unforseen disasters, the new GUI should be up within the next couple days.

I just want to post a quick note before I leave for the long weekend (in the US, it’s Memorial Day Weekend).

The updates are coming along nicely.  I have proof-of-concept code working for the drag-n-drop capability.  Also, I just got a nice color-picker prototype working.  (I should write an article about it…there are very few color-pickers on the web that actually let you do what I’ve done).  My plan is to let people customize the light and dark square colors.   I want people to be able to add some personality to their ChessUp diagrams, as opposed to all of them looking like the same cookie-cutter images.

I’m going to do zero coding for the next 5 days.  My goal is to get the updates out the first week of June.  Stay tuned, and have a good holiday.

OK, I decided to fix one last bug before I switch over to the new GUI, since this particular bug seemed to be so annoying.

In Interner Explorer, users were getting lots of “undefined” messages when they viewed the page for the first time.  This is because a cookie was not set properly.  I was able to replicate the problem.  After applying a fix, it seems to be gone.

Finding out your site is #1 when you search for its name in all the major search engines:

Google 

Yahoo!

Windows Live 

AOL 

I still don’t show up in Ask.com.

The bad news is that there are a couple annoying bugs that randomly appear in ChessUp. One of them causes the board to be slightly off-center when the page loads. Another causes lots of “undefined”’s to appear in the URL when you try to create an image.

The good news is that I’m not going to fix any of these bugs.

Why is that good news? Because I’m planning on updating the ChessUp GUI and making it better than ever.

Want drag and drop? It’s in the works.

Want some more graphic choices? They are coming.

The truth is that ChessUp is still an alpha product. Some gremlins are still in the system, some usability issues still need to be worked out. But it’s getting better and more robust every week.

My goal is for ChessUp to be the best online chess diagram creator on the web. I’m not there yet, but I have every intention of getting there…

The FEN problem in Internet Explorer has been fixed.  The problem was occuring when a user with IE reloaded the ChessUp GUI, and IE complained about an invalid FEN (which was stored in the cookie).

I’ve tested the FEN support in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer 6 and everything seems to be OK now.

Looks like there is a problem with ChessUp in Internet Explorer.   It doesn’t like the “/” character in the FEN notation (because, y’know, a slash is a really special character.  Sigh).  I’ll post a note when I get this fixed.

(Yes, I should have tested this change in IE before I put the code up.  Lesson learned.)