Welcome to CrossBow 1.03 ------------------------ CrossBow allows you to display and fill in crosswords on your Pilot. This is the fourth non-beta release! Thanks to all the people who played with the various betas. I was quite surprised how few bug reports people have passed on to me; I hope this is an indication of the quality of the software, rather than a lack of interest :-). CrossBow is now shareware. If you really like it and feel you get something out of it, then please send $5 (or whatever you think the program is worth) in your local currency to one of the following addresses ... In the USA In Australia ---------- ------------ Jeannine Hammersley Harry Ohlsen 3852 Perie Lane, GPO Box 4281, San Jose, CA, Sydney, NSW 95132 2001 Changes in Version 1.03 ----------------------- I've fixed a bug that was pointed out by Sean Goldin. If you used the page up/down keys to move through clues, your changes to other clues weren't kept. Also, Steve Orich preferred dashes to '?' for blank spots and pointed out that my change to leave the answer field in the clues form blank if you had not entered anything for a clue made it hard to tell how many squares there were in the separate parts of multi- part answers. I've changed it back to always displaying something for each square. There is now an entry in the Options menu to toggle between dashes and '?'. The default is '?', of course :-). I've been hacking away a bit, but not getting very far with other features. I think I'm going to make this the last release for a while and carry on with something else. Bugs will be fixed, of course, as they are pointed out to me. If anyone has specific ideas or requests, feel free to drop me a line. Possibilities for Version 1.04 ------------------------------ I still haven't put in a real about box yet; that will happen in one of the next few versions. I still want to allow hypertext-style jumping to related clues, to aid in solving cryptics. At the moment, this looks like it will only be for my own use, since I've heard nothing from anyone else re this feature. Hence, I'm not rushing to get it in. I've written some code to generate anagrams, but have decided that it's not worth installing it into CrossBow, because without an on-line dictionary the user would have to look through far too many possibilities. If anyone out there would particularly like this feature, send me some mail and I'll re-evaluate my decision. There are still the bugs to do with not re-drawing the form correctly when: 1) the applications display is opened and closed; and 2) the keyboard is opened and closed in the clues form. I've tried fairly hard to sort those out, but to no avail. For the time being, I've decided to ignore them. If anyone can suggest how to fix them, please let me know. Let me know if you find any other bugs, or have suggestions for improvements. Changes In Version 1.02 ----------------------- Whoops! A minor bug fix. When I replaced the timestamp, that screwed up jumping back to the previous crossword. Version 1.02 sorts that out. My apologies to anyone who was bitten by 1.01 !! Changes in Version 1.01 ----------------------- The timestamp is back! However, you'll only see it if you look at a crossword inside memopad. The reason it's back is that now the displayed list of crosswords is sorted so that the most recently accessed crosswords appear first. This may be of no value to anyone else, but I tend to keep working on crosswords until I get them out, or get really stuck! At the moment, I have about 20 I'm attacking, so having them sorted is handy. One person said they'd prefer to have the clues form stay up, irrespective of whether you lift the cursor in the "Show Clues" area. There is now a toggle under the Options menu. When you enter the last character of an answer, the cursor now goes into virtual space, so that backspacing works as you would expect. I used to do this, but when you were at an edge, the direction marker ended up drawing outside the crossword. I've now fixed that, so this feature is back in. Changes Since 0.13 ------------------ This version provides all the features I wanted when I first started work on CrossBow. Therefore, I've decided it should be the first non-beta release !! There have been a number of minor fixes, and one new feature has been added. The crossword is now always stored, irrespective of whether you have modified the text. This is so that the current across and down clue numbers in the clues form are remembered across invocations. The amount of time it takes to store the crossword is quite small, so I don't think this is a problem. Now, if you are sitting in the clues form, but haven't actually modified the crossword, you will still be returned to the correct place the next time you run CrossBow. I've removed the timestamp, since it was originally there only to differentiate between copies of the same crossword, when I was creating a new memo for each save of the crossword. That was fixed in beta 0.10, so I've decided the timestamp is no longer necessary. If anyone can see a reason for having it, please let me know. Finally, the battery voltage is displayed at the bottom left of the screen. This is not to suggest that I think CrossBow will drain your battery! However, I'd like to think that people are going to spend a lot of time using it to solve their crosswords :-). Changes Since 0.12 ----------------------- The UI has been cleaned up significantly. When you start CrossBow it returns to where it was last time. "Edit Grid" has been made a menu item, since it won't often be used. When you bring up the clues form, the "Show Clues" area changes to "Hide Clues" and "Done" disappears, since it is not relevant in this mode. There are menu options to specify the standard or bold font. There is a menu option to display the title of the crossword you are working on. Changes Since 0.11 ------------------ You are no longer queried whether to save the crossword when you press "Done". It is automatically saved for you if anything has changed. I've given this a quick test, but not an exhaustive one, so let me know if you think this mechanism isn't working. Changes Since 0.10 ------------------ Well, it took some careful reading of the documentation, and a little experimentation, but CrossBow now replaces the current memo when you save, rather than creating a new one. The timestamp has also been changed to include the day of the week. Changes Since 0.06 ------------------ There is now a converter for the USA Today puzzle, which is easily accessible to all you people in the US via ... http://www.usatoday.com/life/puzzles/puzzle.htm There is a link there to today's crossword and also one to the index of crosswords for the last month. All of the USA Today crosswords for October are contained in the file ... http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/usatoday.zip The separate ".txt" files for each day are in ... http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/usatoday/ Now, it's back to hacking CrossBow itself. Stay tuned for a new version in the next day or so ... Note that, unlike the browser helper application, the answers are not included in these crosswords. I'll do that at some later stage ... Changes Since 0.05 ------------------ I've done some more cleaning up of the re-drawing, and done a general clean-up up of the code. There are now converters for The Times crossword that takes the HTML from the crossword page and turns it into a memo in the correct format for CrossBow. The converter is at ... http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/times.exe It's a DOS command-line program. You give it a file with an extension of ".html" and it generates one with the same name, but an extension of ".txt". I have provided a set of crosswords, mainly cryptic at the moment, in the same directory as CrossBow. There are a number of separate zip files, each with one type of crossword ... http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/smh.zip http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/times.zip http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/telegrph.zip http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/suntimes.zip SMH.ZIP contains one quick crossword and one cryptic. All the others are cryptics, I'm afraid. If anyone out there is creating CrossBow-formatted crosswords, I'd like to hear about it. You can either mail them to me, or make them available and I'll let people know where they are. I intend to set up a web page sometime soon that is kept up-to-date with new crosswords, hopefully with at least one new quick crossword and one new cryptic each day. For the time being, there are separate directories containing ".txt" files for the different kinds of crosswords ... http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/smh/ http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/times/ http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/telegrph/ http://wr.com.au/harryo/crossbow/suntimes/ As I say, most of these are cryptic. Changes Since 0.04 ------------------ Finally, CrossBow has an icon! Tim Warner kindly created one for me, for which I thank him. As it turned out, I didn't use that one, because it was a .BMP file and I had no idea how to get it into the resources. Hence, I ended up drawing my own. I liked Tim's better and will attempt to use it later, once I work out how to do so. In the clues form, the up and down hardware keys perform the same operation the Next and Prev buttons used to. The buttons will be replaced at some later time by more useful functions. This idea came from Steve Orich. As I said to him, I'm amazed how stupid I can be sometimes. I'd been wanting to regain some screen real estate to put on some other features in the clues form, but had not thought of the obvious! I've made the reading of clues a little more robust, so they don't have to be on a single line in the memo. This seems to work OK, but let me know if you find any problems with the display of clues. A number of problems with unnecessary drawing of grid squares and text have been corrected. There is still one such problem: if you use the pop-up keyboard in the clues form, the grid is not re-drawn. I assume the keyboard form only saves the contents of the currently active form. Since the grid is not active at the time the keyboard is drawn, it doesn't get refreshed when the keyboard disappears. I would appreciate it if someone out there who knows more about this would tell me assumptions are correct, in case I'm doing something stupid that's causing this problem. In any case, I'll try to sort that out in the next version. Plans for 0.06 -------------- I intend to allow hypertext-style jumps from one clue to another, for use in cryptic crosswords, where clues often refer to each other. I'd also like to add a facility for generating anagrams, which are useful in cryptics. I intend to use the two buttons that have been freed up by using the page up/down hardware buttons. I'm not sure yet how the interface should work. If anyone has an idea, please let me know at harryo@ise.com.au, below. If possible, I'll change the startup so that CrossBow goes back to the current crossword if you were in one when you swapped applications. I still want to clean up the saving of crosswords, so that they go back into the same memo, rather than creating a new one each time. However, I have to do a bit of research before I can do that. If anyone has any other ideas for features they'd like added, or any kind of clean-up re the user interface or anything else, let me know. That's a big list, so some of them may end up in later versions. I intend to release new versions as I quickly as possible, so people can (hopefully) enjoy the program more and to get feedback as I make changes, in case people think I'm going in the wrong direction. Changes Since 0.03 ------------------ The "Show only incomplete clues" checkbox's value is remembered when the clues form is closed. The characters no longer "bleed" over the top and bottom of squares. A number of the characters had strange alignment, due to the Pilot using a proportional font. I've moved some of them horizontally so they are more or less centred in the squares. Changes Since 0.02 ------------------ Version 0.3 fixes a couple of bugs in the clues dialog box and adds a checkbox to allow you to specify that you only want to see clues for which you have not entered an answer. Installing CrossBow ------------------- Install the program into your pilot in the normal way (ie, by running the application installer and then doing a HotSync). Installing Crosswords --------------------- In order to make it easy for anyone else to set up crosswords they want to work on, CrossBow simply reads any memos it finds in the category "Crosswords". The format of each such memo is as follows (you might want to take a look at one of the examples to see what I'm talking about) ... Title Grid BWBWBWBWBWBWBWB WWBBWBBWBWBWBBW etc. Across 1 This is the clue for 1 across (5) 3 This is the clue for 3 across (2,4) Down 2 This is the clue for 2 down (6,3) 4 This is the clue for 4 down (12) Each clue should be on a single line (ie, let the memo pad part of Pilot Desktop do any line-wrapping for you, don't type any extra carriage returns ... this is just for now; I intend to handle multiple lines later). Again, have a look at one of the samples to see what the format is like. You should just cut/paste the text of the sample into a memo in Pilot Desktop, and put it in the category "Crosswords". Using CrossBow's Interface -------------------------- When you start CrossBow, it displays a list of all the crosswords it finds in the "Crosswords" memo pad category. Clicking on one gets you into that crossword. Assuming there is nothing horribly wrong with your crossword's definition, you should see what looks like a real crossword grid, with black and white squares. Clicking on a square allows you to write in it using Graffiti. If you look very carefully, you should see two small dots either to the right of the square, or at the bottom of the square. The former says you are writing across, the latter means down. I intend to make this better later, by making the clue you have clicked on a different gray scale, but I'm waiting on Ed to get back to me on how he achieved this in his demo. Stay tuned. At the bottom of the sceen, there are three areas titled (1) "Edit Grid", (2) "Show Clues" and (3) "Done". (1) toggles between entering answers and editing the grid. If the little square is filled, then clicking on squares changes their colour, otherwise it just marks where you want to enter your answers. (2) displays the clue associated with the current position of the cursor. If you just click on (2) the clue appears until you lift the pen. However, if you click and then drag the pen upwards (kind of similar to getting the keyboard to appear using Graffiti) the clue box stays until you click in (2) again. While it is displayed, you can navigate through the clues using the four buttons. You can also enter text into the answer field and it should (although I've had a couple of bugs in this area) appear in the grid when you later exit the clue box. (3) is used to finish working on a crossword. If you answer "yes" to the question that is asked, you will get a new memo created (I'm working on it being an update, rather than a new memo) containing the current state of the grid. If you say no, then any changes you have made will be discarded. Also, if you leave CrossBow by going to another application, the current contents are saved to a new memo. As I say, I have yet to work out how to replace the current memo, so what I've done in the meantime is to make the title each new crossword memo have a timestamp, so you can tell which one is the latest. Anyway, please let me know of any bugs you find, and any suggestions for improvements, either to the user interface or just generally. I intend to do some heavy work on CrossBow for the next week or so, until I sort out all the glitches. One thing to note is that the smallest font is still slightly too big for a 15 X 15 grid (which is the only thing you can have at the moment, but will change later), so when text is entered it bleeds off the top and bottom of each square slightly. I intend to write a font editor and create a 7-point font later. One other thing about the user interface. When you click on a square that is part of both an across and a down clue, the default action is for CrossBow to assume you are entering the across clue. However, if you drag the pen in the direction you want to go it picks that up. The Included Crosswords ----------------------- SMH5932 is a quick crossword from the Sydney Morning Herald SMH14817 is a cryptic from the same day ST3674 is a cryptic from the Sunday Times I eventually intend to keep a page full of crosswords that will be updated on a daily or weekly basis, and I'm hoping other people will do the same. I'd love to do the New York Times crossword every now and then! Well, have fun and send me some e-mail if you have any comments. You could also take a look at my home page at ... http://wr.com.au/harryo but it's in the process of being updated ... I want to make it the main Australian Pilot page eventually :-). Ciao for now ... Harry O. harryo@ise.com.au