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As a fairly serious chess player I often try to come up with app ideas related to chess. I happened to look for an Elo calculator (Elo is an international rating system used in chess and several other games) and to my surprise didn’t find a free app, only paid ones that looked to have been designed for iOS5. So I decided to spend a bank holiday developing one.

I decided to divide the screen into three areas. Top area is the form where you set your current rating, K-Factor (depending on many things, like your age, current rating etc) and your result on the games. The second area is a tableview with all your opponent ratings. New opponents can be added using the +-button at the top right. Each opponent has it’s own rating and an “expected result”, which determines the change in your rating. The last area is the results area which presents your expected result (how many points you should’ve gotten), your new rating + change and your performance rating. The calculations use the guidelines offered by FIDE, the World Chess Federation, and it varies a bit from some national methods. If I reach any results with the app, I might add more national calculation options as well.

I’m quite happy with the result and very curious to see if receives any downloads in such a niche market. It hit the store late last night (13.06.2015) and seems to be doing quite well with it’s keywords. The app is definitely not my prettiest one as I didn’t use a designer for it, but it definitely does that job and I plan to use it myself, which I guess is already something!

The app is available for free at the Apple AppStore.