Free Chess Clock 0.2

I found and fixed some awkward behavior in Chess Clock 0.1.

Symptom

It is possible to accidentally reset the clock. In fact, it was too easy to do that - by hitting Enter instead of right Shift while the focus was still on the Reset button.

Solution

Do not reset the clock if a game is in progress. In order to reset the clock once a game has started, the page has to be reloaded. As a side effect, the clock could be paused (while the alert is being displayed.)

Availability

1. A new standalone version is available for download.
2. The online page has also been updated.

Enjoy!

Free Chess Clock 0.1

If you have shopped around for chess clocks, you may have noticed those things are not cheap - starting from $30 and going up to $150. This inspired me to write a simple program that acts as a chess clock.

Software Chess Clock

My objective was to make the program available on as many platforms as possible - PC, tablet, phone, etc. - running various operating systems. I chose to implement it as a single, static, HTML page with JavaScript. As long as you have a web browser with JavaScript enabled, you can enjoy my free software chess clock. And yes, it is completely free (within the limits of the BSD license).

How to Use It

Enter the names of the players as well as the number of minutes per player. Click the Start/Reset button. The clock will start ticking the first time you press the Shift key on your keyboard.

For best experience, launch the page under Internet Explorer since that is the only browser out of the ones I tested with that distinguishes between the left Shift key and the right Shift key. When the page is launched under any other web browser, pressing either Shift key switches the side.

Where to Find It

1. Since this is a standalone HTML page, you can download it once and then use it locally from your computer/device.
2. Alternatively, you can browse it directly from my website.

Enjoy my free chess clock, and enjoy playing chess!

US Patent No. 7,818,311

This idea came to me while I was writing the original version of my popular eSqlBlast tool. (Special thanks to my buddy Jarek Kowalski for maintaining it after I left the Entity Framework team.) I needed to parse batches of Entity SQL statements and I didn’t want to spend too much time on that. I figured regular expressions would suffice, but I needed a gigantic regex that I couldn’t write correctly. So I came up with this simple preprocessor that can build gigantic regexes out of many simple ones.

The full details are publically available at the US Patent and Trade Office web site.