Good Mac OS X 10.7+ chess program?

Anyone know of a good chess program for Mac OS X 10.7+?  I upgraded my OS recently and can no longer use Sigma Chess.

Xboard?

http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=50428

Shredder I think might do the trick

XBoard is such a hard-to-use UI, at least on a Mac, and Shredder costs money. I can download free chess engines, I'm just looking for a decent UI to 1) connect to the engine, 2) load PGNs, so I can 3) analyze my games with the assistance of a computer.  Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

In the next day or two I'll be downloading the demo version of shredder.  I think the demo version only comes in basic shredder, and i'll be using that for the 30 day free trial.

I'll be using it to play games against the PC (sometimes i travel and dont have internet access).  And mostly, i'll be using Shredder to analys my games played here at chess.com and also my games against the PC.

I'm looking at buying the Shredder for 50 euros (not deep shredder which is 90 euros).  I think the demo version only comes in the basic shredder version (20 euros) but if its any good I'll buy the 50 euro version.

I've just bought a MBP and am running 10.8 (mountain lion?).

I'm happy to post back how i find it.  Sure, shredder costs money but I've heard its very stable and does the job.  If it works OK i dont mind paying 50 Euros for something I'll use often.

I was asked this recently. If you use the forum search function on the right, enter Mac Chess Program  (or such like words) in there it shows all the other threads people have created to discuss the variety of chess programs available for Macs

This will be released very soon, and probably will be te best gui for mac:

http://www.hiarcs.com/chess-explorer.htm

Another good gui is Shredderchess. You can also install the demo version (30 days, max 1700 elo)

Free stuff:

Xboard,

scid

jose

But they are quite old stilish or lacking some features. I think the best one of them is scid.. Very nice database, laks just a match analisys and the gui its quite horrible.

I have posted the latest build of chessx for the Mac at www.box.com/chessx

These builds are far more recent than you will find elsewhere. The chessx website itself and it's available downloads haven't been updated in almost two years while the source code has been improved dramatically. So I decided to provide updated downloads myself until they become available from the main site.

Many people have found that chessx has the best gui available for a chess program on the mac. I also posted the latest free chess engines for the mac. The stockfish engine I have built myself so it also is more up to date than you will find elsewhere.

G'day James

I read the computerchess.pdf.  Its not immeadiately clear to me which GUI and engines are free for the Mac.  Would i need to download chessx and then the stockfish engine to use in chessx?

Chessx its an opensource gui available for all platforms and can use a lot of engines. I dont remember if it have also some basic engine included, but for sure not stockfish. You shoud and install chessx, download stockfish and place it somewhere and then configure chessx to use this engine.

ChessX its a good product.

The only feature it really misses (IMHO) its the ability to analyze a whole match. You can upload a pgn, but you cannot hell chessX to analyze top-bottom the whole match. IMHO thats one of the most usefull feature in the world , at least for my usage. What i want to do mostly its analyze my matches and understand why i lost, so upload a pgn and let him anayze the whole match. Once finished look what the engine sayd about your moved, to understand why you lost.

Sheredderchess have this feature. Unfortunaly its not free, but you can buy just the basic version and then add any free engine (stockfishfor examble ) you want.

All the files I posted on www.box.com/chessx are free. ChessX and the Stockfish engine are open source and the binaries I have posted are recently built from the latest source code. The Critter and Komodo3 engines are also free. You first need to download ChessX, when you run chessX you can open the preferences and install the engine from the Preferences.../Engines tab. Just click on the Add... button and browse to the downloaded engines file. From the View menu you can enable one of the Analysis views. From there you can select the engine, the number of lines to show, and just hit Analyze. ChessX is a pgn browser so you can use it to browse your pgn files and analyze positions.

ghillan I will add game/match analysis to my list of things to implement in chessX. I would imagine you would want to be able to set

the engine to use

a time or depth to analyze each position

a numeric blunder setting to filter out blunders to be commented on.

For any identified blunders the comments should then contain the top line which the engine identified as an improvement with its evaluation versus the evaluation of your move.

Do you have any other suggestions?

Well.. James i wasnt hoping that a developer would do something just because I consider something usefull. You decide how many people would like this feature. 1 good interesting thing tho, its that none of the free tools mostly used ( exept arena , but its windows only) have this feature, and arena output analisys its really crap anyway ( no PGN) and very hardly readable.

Anyway, since we are talking about match analysis i could tell you how works on Shredderchess.

First off, the obvious time/ move.

Analize just black or white or both

Treshold for variation. This need a little explaination. The analisys should give the valuation for each move but oviousluy should not give you entire variation anytime you dont find the best move. The treshold its a rate where the analisys give you an alternate ( best path). For examble if i was winning because i had +0.25 but then i make a bad move and drop to -0.30 , i dropped by 0.55. The treshold its the minimum dropping value to before to suggest the best move and show the continuation. If someone wasnt just to look at macroscopic errors the he can put a big treshop, if want more complex analisis with a lot of variation at each inacuracy then put  a very low treshold. Obviously if there is a drop bigegr thatn the treshold dont give just the correct move. Show the next best N moves for both players. where the N could dephend on a depth or max time analysis per variaton ( at your choise) 

the engine selection is not that mandatory. you can always just use the "currently active" engine...

For some reason Shredderchess analize backwards ( from last move to the first), where other tools analyze forward. I dont know exacly why, but i suppose that if you analize backward you are totally sure that the engine consider the move that the player did ( that isnt missing the moves that the player really did), or you already know the "best moves" if you follow how the match its done. So its easier to valuate the current move . Probably have to do with the evaluation algoritm.

A good thing you could do, its to download a demo version of shredderchess.Upload a math pgn, and try make a full analisys. I think you will find a lot of hints .

@JamesCoons what do I do to implement pgn's that I have copied instead of downloaded I'm not sure. You should also have a tutorial explaining how to use this program for beginners like me.

There's Apple's own app right there in the Applications folder called Chess unless you've deleted all the files in the folder.

good free chess app for beginners — pChess — right here on chess.com: 

http://www.chess.com/download/view/pchess-192-uci

I know this is old, but I just wanted to adress this.  Historically, yes, xboard was very hard to use, espcially as it was a pure X11 command line app.  It had to be launched with the desired settings on the terminal evrey time, didn't save settings, and was a real pain.

 Since the old days of 4.2.7, things are a lot easier.  There are actual menus now to get you to do what you want. There is now a new GTK2 interface, which can be used instead of the old one.

 And now, for mac people, its all been bunlded into a single app through the quartz version of gtk2.  All you got to do is throw it on your hard drive and double click!  There is a menu to launch one of the built in engines or load your own. If you want to play on the internet on fics or icc, there are external scripts you can launch like shortcuts.  To load a pgn file all you got to do is click on it and xboard will automatically launch with it open.  Or drag and drop works, too.

http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=53274&p=200662#p200662

They have several GUI's as well for a variaty of platforms, for using their engine. You can of course download the engine without a gui.

Why use some clone insted of the real deal? Use Chess.