Recent Site Improvements
Now that July is upon us, it's fitting to look back and review some of the cool things we did on the site last month. June was a BIG month for changes around here! Here are highlights, starting with the bigger stuff...
A Face-lift for Chess Mentor!
Chess Mentor used to be "a lot to look at," especially for new users - but by consolidating the Hints and notes to appear in the same space, and then moving some of the help features up to the right of the board, we made things cleaner & easier!
New Tactics Trainer Charts!
Get a detailed view of a month, week or day on the new "Recent Activity" page. Here, a new bar graph will show you how many tactics you've done per day over a given month, along with your success/fail rate for each day.
For even more information about your rating fluctuation, check out the new "candlestick" graph. For each day, you can see your opening rating, your highest rating, your lowest rating, and your final rating. And you can see at a glance whether you are trending up or down day after day, based on the colors of the bars.
Last but not least, back on the Tactics home page, there is a new bar graph to show you how well you score on your tactics by theme. Do you do better on Pins than Skewers? Are you a poor attacker of the castled king? Here's where you can find out! (The more tactics you do, of course, the better the results!)
(Later on, when we roll out "custom tactics sessions" - where you will be able to choose what kind of tactics you want to practice - this graph will help you choose where to focus your energy!)
Improved "Start New Game" page for Online chess!
Gone is the old form with its confusing, conditional sections that would appear & disappear. This new version makes your options clear & simple - and makes it that much easier to start games with the people you play the most. It's so great, you'll probably want to start a new game right now!
Themes in Live Chess!
Begone, dull gray background! Now you can add your own personal touch to the Live Chess experience by selecting or uploading your own custom background and more!
Don't use a special theme? No problem: Visit your "Customize Chess.com" page to get started!
Live Games in Explorer
Now when looking at your own games in Explorer (or those of another member), you can learn from performance in all Live games that had time-controls of 5 minutes or higher! View Online games, Live games or both at once!
... And while all that was going on, we also added (or fixed) a lot of small things too! Here's a selection:
- Improved Tactics Analysis Board - now features a separate scrolling area for analysis & source data
- Improved visibility on Team/Group metrics
- Added ability to jump straight from a completed Online game to a Live Analysis board with that game preloaded - great for coaches!
- We fixed our Facebook invites!
- More granular e-chess alerts: You can now choose to get alerts for "Your Move" separately from other alerts (low time, game-over result); this is handy for mobile users or those with many games in play (who may not appreciate "Your Move" alerts/emails so much). Simply review your Online Chess Alert settings to get it the way you like.
- Added a "Minimum Games" setting (to restrict joiners) to configuration for Team Matches
- Added the ability to manually check-off Learning Positions in Computer Workout! So you can mark a given position as "attempted" whether you've done it or not, meaning that you don't have to "prove" you can checkmate with 2 Rooks if you already know you can. :)
Finally, we laid the groundwork for some cool new Facebook-sharing features... Facebookers will soon be able to add their Chess.com activity to their Timelines! Watch for that, "coming soon"!
That's it for now! Can't wait to see what July will bring... :)
