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This is a very slick little application! Some random thoughts: It wasn't obvious to me that the anagram clues were anagrams. Woul it really kill you to spell
by binarybits 19y ago
This is a very slick little application! Some random thoughts:
It wasn't obvious to me that the anagram clues were anagrams. Woul it really kill you to spell out "anagram?" Maybe even put "Anagram:" before the clue instead of putting it in parentheses afterwards?
What's the point of the "play" button? Why not just give the user a puzzle right out of the gate?
The delete key should let me delete a letter, and probably go back to the previous letter.
There should be some way to choose the direction of my typing with the mouse when I click a square that starts both an across and a down arrow. For example, perhaps add a little "right" arrow and a little "down" arrow in opposite corners of the square that users can push? At the very least, if I'm entering a "down" word and I click a square in that word that's also part of an "across" word, it's confusing for it to switch to the across word.
Let people make their own puzzles. A really easy way to do this would be to simply ask the user to enter 40 or 50 word-clue pairs, which you could then assemble into a new puzzle. This might also be a source for new clue ideas.
Relatedly: let users rate clues. This will allow you to refine your database. Your rating options might be something like "Hard," "medium," "easy," and "unfair." Clues that get several "unfair" ratings could be automatically weeded out of the database. Once you had a substantial database of ratings for clues, you could offer puzzles with varying difficulty levels based on the ratings.
- binarybits 19y agoHuh, I guess asterisks have special meaning in the site markup. I was trying to make a bulleted list, but instead I got every other point italicized.
- davidw 19y agoSee: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27783 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27783