New Mac equipment. How to get the most 'chess' out of it?

I have a new macbook pro with the i7 processor, and a second generation ipad. I am new to chess but have some books like MCO 15 and John Nunn's end game books. I was wondering how best to use the technology available to me to better my chess. I have chessmaster 10 as well.

I was thinking about using a database and chess engine, but to be honest, I'm not sure what that means. After shelling out for the macbook and the ipad, I'm hoping someone can steer me towards free software if that is the best use of my computer.

Thank you all, in advanced, for any help that you can be.

Paint squares on the cover and use it as a chessboard

You might want to checkout shredder chess app at itunes for the ipad. It's the #1 chess app(be sure to download the ipad version cuz if you download the iphone version the image will be small) and if you do purchase it you will get a $10 off coupon code to download one of the higher/more complete shredder chess programs at the shredder website for download to your mac book. Stockfish is a very good chess app also and it's free(full size image for iphone and ipad). Hope this helps.

"I just got this new, fancy expensive gadget; it's like the latest thing and it's amazingly cool! So, uh...- anyone know what I can do with it, if anything?"

Apple customers.

Thanks for the advice Bronco. The first comment was kinda funny. I laughed the first time I read it. The third comment from someone who is obviously a blemish on the 'Finest City in the United States,' if that's the best they can do to help a fellow chess.com member get the most of this fabulous game.

I wrote this thread with the hope that I might find some advice from those with more experience, not to start a flame war about Mac's or the people that use them. I'm a software developer, so obviously I know what to do with my machine.

Thanks in advance for any sincere help.

I'm not flaming, just being a jerk as usual.

The anti-quarki cabal meets at midnight on Fridays.

We'll fix his wagon, eventually, after we sort out pizza night.

 

Antiquark cabal? What do you do there?- Put a bar over my effigy?

We do lots of things to your effigy. Best not to ask.

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Ok I'm sorry my stupid comment about Apple customers was found to be offensive.

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np

The best free option I've found for chess engine & interface on Mac are Sigma Chess interface with the Stockfish Engine. I've gotten some good mileage out of these as stockfish is a quite strong engine, and sigma chess is pretty easy to use to run your games through and analyze. SCID is a free database program that runs on Mac. I don't have any experience with that one, but I've heard plenty of people singing its praises and saying that you never need to go to ChessBase (which isn't available for Mac) with that. A pay database software option for mac is ExaChess but it's comparably expensive to ChessBase. Most chess software is built for PCs, not Macs, and due to this I've recently "accepted defeat" so to speak and put a bootcamp Windows partition on my Mac just for chess software. These free options on Mac are really probably plenty, though, without having to do that. :)

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I am offended by your apology.

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Ok then I take it back; iPads suck.

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I can also recommend this setup. Use it on my iMac to great success.

 

Also, the built in Chess.app is so incredibly stupid that even a beginner like myself can beat it without thinking. Nice job, Apple. :|

I downloaded the Shredder for my Linux setup and it's NICE.  same deal for MAC, here:

 

http://www.shredderchess.com/chess-software/macintosh.html

ElizaLulu wrote: I've recently "accepted defeat" so to speak and put a bootcamp Windows partition on my Mac just for chess software. These free options on Mac are really probably plenty, though, without having to do that. :) Do you know if I use bootcamp on my Mac book will it recognize pc disks and download the program(chessmaster) ?

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To use Bootcamp (which is already part of your Mac OS), you have to install a copy of Windows (which you have to buy separately if you don't own one already) to a separate partition, and then you will choose to boot either into Mac OS or Windows, so you are only using 1 OS at a time. You can do anything with the windows part that you can do with Windows (including use ChessMaster), but you won't have access to the Mac part while you are using the Windows part. The amount of space you give to the Windows partition is fixed, and you can't expand or contract that space after you set it, except if you decide to completely delete Windows to reset it.

There is another option. (There may be many others, but this is the other option I have experience with). You can also buy a program called "Parallels". It's a similar idea to Bootcamp, letting you install a copy of Windows, but instead of it being a completely separate instance that you boot into and use independently of the Mac OS, it runs from within the Mac OS. You still have to have a copy of Windows and install it, but then you can be running windows programs at the same time as Mac programs. The downfall of this is that you won't get native performance on the Windows stuff, as your machine will be running 2 different OS's at once. The benefit is that you can easily share files between the two, and start up and shut down Windows whenever you need without having to shut down what you're working on in the Mac, and the disk space it takes is dynamic - You can give it a really small amount to start, and it can take more space if it needs it. If you went the Parallels option, I definitely would still opt for using the your chess engine (i.e. Stockfish) from Mac when you don't have parallels running since you want to have the best performance you can from your machine to get the best analyses.

Thank you so much ElizaLulu

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Chess.app is a version of Sjeng. It is Grand Master level, some 2500 Elo rating.

You have to set it up for a stronger level, giving it more time. It comes with preferences.