Crossword

I just hacked together a simple Gemini UI for solving crosswords. Any thoughts on how readable and usable it is?

2024-10-20 · 1 year ago · 👍 skyjake, stack, dragfyre, soweli-iki

20 Comments ↓

this is great. it's hard to read and lineup the words, but I'm not sure what it would look like with cell borders using | and _.

@mrrobinhood5 I don't want to waste any lines, but I have now added '|' at the sides. I also spaced things out horizontally, which I think makes it quite a bit more readable. (To see the new version, you'll have to start a new session either by using a new client cert or quitting the current session)

pretty good! one thing - for some reason that I couldn't figure out, some guessdd letters disappeared on me, and reverted back to *'s.

@dragfyre Entering non-alphabetic characters in an answer (e.g. spaces) will reset those characters to '*'.

@mbays that's the one! much nicer and cleaner, everything aligns and is easier on the eyes.

It is surprizingly workable!

Personally I find the border lines jarring. Maybe dimmer lines or the round-corner unicode border is worth the slight hassle.

Good job!

P.S. I really miss the ability to split the view-- something we could do in the 90's, for god's sakes!

@stack Thanks, I'm surprised how playable it is too. I dropped the side bars. I also now have some scraping working, so there may even be multiple crosswords to play. What do you mean by "split the view"?

Having thought about it, I think it will look off-kilter without some framing, and I will again strongly recommend a full frame with rounded corners, dim/gray.

I was lamenting the inability to split the screen/window into two separately-scrollable and zoomable views, so I can see the puzzle and scroll the clues. Something Windows 95 could do but for some reason I can no longer do. Am I the only person who always wants to do that?

@stack Lagrange has supported split views since v1.4, and multiple windows since v1.11. Having the grid on the side in a split or window works well here.

The caveats are that on the phone the feature is disabled due to lack of space, and the same zoom level applies to all windows/tabs/splits.

I like it! one thing, it didn't seem to recognize when I had completed the puzzle...

nice changes. maybe add ability to clear the whole word with an empty reply?

Looking good

@johano Now you can check your solution once you're finished (or even earlier). I also added a box-drawing character border for stack, and it should now update each day to the latest Guardian Quick crossword (quit and restart to start the latest puzzle). One day I may add selection between multiple crosswords and saving partial solved states of them.

@mbays nice! bookmarked.

Got an "incomplete header" error just now after checking my correct answer and quitting. oops

A slightly interesting point of copyright arises here. The way this works, I scrape the Guardian's website to obtain the day's crossword. IIUC, when my computer then presents the crossword to a user, I am redistributing it without permission, violating the Guardian's copyright. However, an analogous javascript-based system on the web could have the user download the information directly from the Guardian and do all processing on the user's machine, with no redistribution involved. So this seems to be a case where client-side vs server-side processing makes a crucial difference for copyright. (If anyone can see a reason why what I'm doing is actually permitted, I'd like to hear it! I assume the Guardian's crossword setters wouldn't actually object, and that there's no real chance of their lawyers coming after me, but still.)

Why don't you just use an API or a GitHub repo?

Also you're not using for commercial gain, do maybe fair use for educational purposes?

@mrrobinhood5 Thanks, I didn't know about the nyt_crosswords. Maybe I'll add them at some point. But they seem to have a lot of US-specific clues, so I'm not interested in solving them myself... the real point of this project was just to give myself a nice interface for solving the Guardian crosswords, I'm making it public only because I'm nice like that. ;) I don't know if taking the whole crossword rather than a snippet can count as "fair use".

thanks a lot for this, works like a charm and has me hooked :)

@johan Thanks, that's nice to hear! @mrrobinhood5 I added a shortcut '#' to erase a clue, as well as a more useful version '|' which preserves letters from cross-clues. See the new help page for more.