Indigo Puzzles

We’ve been pretty busy over the last couple of weeks; now that Indigo Puzzles is ticking over nicely we’ve been trying to add some of the Big Things we’ve wanted to do from the start, and we’re pleased to announce that two of them - Enter Your Own and Forums - have now entered Beta!

Enter Your Own has been around for Sudoku since early days, letting you enter your own Sudoku puzzle into the Assistant to help you out.  Well, now it has some friends - Enter Your Own for Kakuro, Hashi and Hitori are now up and running and you can try them out at the site.  No more throwing your paper across the room - just enter them into our Assistant and it won’t just tell you the solution - it will tell you how to solve the puzzle.
The Forums are a really great thing because I get tons of emails from people where I think, this should be on a forum where it can be discussed.  And now it can!  Got a question about puzzles or the site?  Want to make suggestions?  Just want to show off how clever you are at the Atrocious puzzles?  Join in the discussions!
So - try them out, let us know what you think, and start telling us the features you want.  (In fact one of the first discussions on the Forums has led to a new feature on the Assistants, to be rolled out next week - how’s that for people power?)

cheers,

Alastair

Hello all,

A fairly small update to the site this time round to fix a couple of bugs ‘under the bonnet’ and add a couple of features you’ve been asking for…

• [Feature] Deleting Puzzles - This has been a popular request! In your My Puzzles area you can now delete puzzles, sending them to a ‘deleted’ list out of the way (and you can empty the deleted list too if you really can’t bear to have them around any more).
• [Feature] Solving - the old kakuro-san website had a handy “Just Solve It” button for when life was frankly Just Too Short to be stuck on yet another puzzle… and now you can do the same with the new site. We’ve added it to all the Assistants.
• [Feature] KeepAlive - So, you load up a puzzle, work on it for half an hour, try to save and suddenly it tells you you’re not a member. What’s that about then? Well, it was because the website didn’t know you were working on the puzzle. We’ve added a ‘keepalive’ feature so that when you’re working you won’t be logged out.
• [Fix] Hashi - The Hashi Assistant should have been filling in some circles when you asked for advice, to show you where to look and it wasn’t - but it is now.
• [Change] Sign Up - We’ve simplified this page to make it clearer for newbies joining up.
• [Feature] Contact Us - We’ve updated the Contact Us page to add some information for you, and added a couple of fixes under the cover.
• [Change] Documentation - Boring, I know, but we’ve updated some of our help sections and added a link to the Sudoku assistant for people joining us from www.sudoku-san.com to tell them about the new keyboard controls.
• [Change] Hitori - In the Most Trivial Update category… a few of you asked us for a small UI change to Hitori. It used to be ‘one click for filled, two for empty’ and now it’s ‘one click for empty, two for filled’.

Let us know how you get on with the changes, and if you have any more ideas - we’d love to hear from you!

Alastair

What a couple of weeks!

Last Tuesday the site was running ok and everything seemed to be settling in fine, so we switched off the old www.kakuro-san.com website and moved everyone to IndigoPuzzles.com, and sat back.  Then we spent the next two weeks pulling our hair out.

We got a fair bit of feedback, most of it pretty good, some bad, some surprisingly rude (it is a free site after all!).  Some of the feedback was about the new Assistants, so we made some changes and improved the online help.  But the main problem was hoowwwww sloooooowwwww the site suddenly was.  It was awful!  It was taking ages to load every page, and we had timeouts all over the place.  Even worse, the site was falling down.

Of course a lot of it was just because all the kakuro-san visitors were signing up and having a good poke around the site, loading up more pages than they normally would.  But most of it had to be Something Else.  We’ve spent the last two weeks trying to work out what the Something Else was.

Our hosts are the fantastic Rimu Hosting (http://rimuhosting.com) and they were a great help, with extra memory and tips.  And we’ve been scouring the web to see what could have been happening… and finally we think we have it.  We’ll be keeping an eye on things, but the good news is that we think the site is now behaving itself and you should notice a great improvement!

As ever, let us know if you run into any problems, and meanwhile we can concentrate on what we enjoy best - improving the website!

We had a lot of people asking about a way to say they weren’t sure about a cell, even if they’d reduced it down to one value.  In the old (sudokusan.com) days they could put the number in and it would stay small until they next redrew or checked the board.  We always thought of it as a bug - turns out a lot of you were using it as a feature!

So with the new Assistant we’ve decided to add it as a proper feature.  When you’ve reduced a cell down to one value you can now check a box to say “I’m still not sure” - and the number will show up small.

It’s a small thing, but it was clearly driving a lot of you bats and we’re pleased to add it.

Kakuro is the most popular logical puzzle in Japan - yes, that’s right, Kakuro, not Sudoku!  It’s a great puzzle - a sort of Sudoku Crossword - and it requires all the logical challenge of Sudoku, plus a fair bit of pattern spotting and even arithmetic.

We’ve been running Kakuro puzzles at our sister site Kakuro-san, but now we have them at Indigo Puzzles too!  With…

• A tutorial on how to solve them and where to start
• Free Sample puzzles to whet your appetite
• Free daily Kakuros to our members (not a member?  Sign up - it’s free!)

And of course we’ve revamped the Kakuro-san Assistant and brought it along too with a new coat of paint, so you can play online and get logical advice whenever you need it.

Give it a try!

The Indigo Puzzlers

Busy busy busy… The latest version of Indigo Puzzles went live this evening, and it’s stuffed full of new stuff, including -

• Fixes across the site (typos, extra text, formatting stuff)
• Privacy policy
• More help articles added
• HITORI HITORI HITORI!

What’s Hitori?  It’s the first of our new puzzles for the site, and it’s just fab.  Simple to pick up, deviously addictive, and - of course - solvable entirely by logic.  We’ve an introduction, a tutorial on how to solve them, sample puzzles and a free brand new Hitori every day for our members.  Best of all, we’ve created a whole new Hitori-san Assistant - so you can get all the advice and help you need!

Check them out, and get in touch - we’d love to hear what you think of them.

Yesterday afternoon I uploaded the latest batch of updates to IndigoPuzzles.  Quite a few changes, all around the aim of making the site ‘liveable’.  So the books page went up, and so did the Enter Your Own feature (in groovy GWT javascript, naturally).  I’ve put a help system in place (with about two pages of help in it, but at least the framework’s there to add more), and filled in all the empty links on the front page - so they at least take you somewhere.  Added some consolation text for users who couldn’t run the new Assistant.
Once it was all uploaded and running, I figured what the heck and stuck an advert on Sudoku-san.  As of 5pm yesterday we had our first honest-to-goodness user!

Some good feedback coming through already.  Questions about the Privacy Policy since I’m now asking people to register and hand over their details, fair enough - in fact it was on my todo list (but rather far down - I’ve bumped it further up).

Some interesting comments about the new Assistant.  Some liked it, some prefered the old system - what do you think?  Let me know.

Second deploy went up to the website today.  A couple of new pages went up, including the first stab of the books page.  The main change though is to the Assistant.  I’ve updated it so that it is much more keyboard-driven - the number pad is gone and there’s a text box in its place.  And keyboard navigation works - you can use the arrow keys to move around the grid and return to open the cell editor.

After some worries about performance it appears to be ok now.  The main problem is when I ran the site on a CRT screen - it looks awful!  The colours were great on LCD   I’ll have to go through the whole thing and pick some more transferable colours.