Does anyone know if there is a Freeway Action to enable me to place crosswords onscreen for users to solve online?
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Have you found an example of this elsewhere? When you say solve, do
you mean like an application that runs on the server or browser, where
the user enters letters in a form input and sees if the solution is
correct, or do you mean print it out and find a pencil?
Walter
On Jul 30, 2011, at 12:22 PM, John Bates wrote:
Does anyone know if there is a Freeway Action to enable me to place
crosswords onscreen for users to solve online?
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Thanks Waltd. I meant people could actually click into a line across or down and then type in the answer to the clue which would be onscreen. The Guardian cryptic crosswords can be solved this way or printed out to work on with a pencil.
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It’s trivial to enter the text in the page using JavaScript, less
trivial to actually score the thing…
If you draw a text field in the page where the puzzle grid is, make it
2 characters wide, and set it to a max length of 1, your visitors can
type in their letters on screen. You could add a JavaScript function
to “hop” to the next field after each keypress. Where this gets
slightly complex is if you have a corner letter – does the hop go
across, or down?
Or, you could approach this from the questions end, add a text field
there after the clue, and when that field changes, update the puzzle
grid with the entry. The trick there will be drawing an HTML box
inside each grid field (or use a table) and then use the classname of
that box to determine which letter goes there.
It’s a pretty interesting JavaScript problem, and probably wouldn’t be
too difficult to solve, but the only challenge implementing this in
Freeway will be strictly controlling the classname of each box and the
source code order of the resulting HTML, otherwise it’s going to be
very tricky to get the JavaScript to find each element it’s trying to
update.
There’s no Action to build this, and I’ve never heard of this type of
application before, but maybe someone will have some time to rip apart
the Guardian’s implementation and see how they did it. That’s the
thing about JavaScript (or anything else embedded in HTML) – it’s
eminently steal-able.
Walter
On Jul 30, 2011, at 12:54 PM, John Bates wrote:
Thanks Waltd. I meant people could actually click into a line across
or down and then type in the answer to the clue which would be
onscreen. The Guardian cryptic crosswords can be solved this way or
printed out to work on with a pencil.
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Check out Crossword Forge http://www.solrobots.com/crosswordforge/index.html
I’ve not tried it, but it looks as though it would meet your need.
On Jul 30, 2011, at 10:08 AM, Walter Lee Davis email@hidden wrote:
It’s trivial to enter the text in the page using JavaScript, less trivial to actually score the thing…
If you draw a text field in the page where the puzzle grid is, make it 2 characters wide, and set it to a max length of 1, your visitors can type in their letters on screen. You could add a JavaScript function to “hop” to the next field after each keypress. Where this gets slightly complex is if you have a corner letter – does the hop go across, or down?
Or, you could approach this from the questions end, add a text field there after the clue, and when that field changes, update the puzzle grid with the entry. The trick there will be drawing an HTML box inside each grid field (or use a table) and then use the classname of that box to determine which letter goes there.
It’s a pretty interesting JavaScript problem, and probably wouldn’t be too difficult to solve, but the only challenge implementing this in Freeway will be strictly controlling the classname of each box and the source code order of the resulting HTML, otherwise it’s going to be very tricky to get the JavaScript to find each element it’s trying to update.
There’s no Action to build this, and I’ve never heard of this type of application before, but maybe someone will have some time to rip apart the Guardian’s implementation and see how they did it. That’s the thing about JavaScript (or anything else embedded in HTML) – it’s eminently steal-able.
Walter
On Jul 30, 2011, at 12:54 PM, John Bates wrote:
Thanks Waltd. I meant people could actually click into a line across or down and then type in the answer to the clue which would be onscreen. The Guardian cryptic crosswords can be solved this way or printed out to work on with a pencil.
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Ah, but that’s Flash, which won’t play on iPad or other iDevices.
Walter
On Jul 30, 2011, at 1:14 PM, Ginger Garnitz wrote:
Check out Crossword Forge http://www.solrobots.com/crosswordforge/index.html
I’ve not tried it, but it looks as though it would meet your need.
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Okay, I had an hour to spend on this, so here you go:
http://scripty.walterdavisstudio.com/crossword
View source to see the (extremely little) JavaScript needed to handle
this. I used Protaculous to insert the code into my page, and then I
followed some very simple rules in naming the form fields and the HTML
boxes that form the words. I also put the Across words at the top of
the stack, and the down words at the bottom, but that was just to fix
a problem with overlapping letters. If you solve the puzzle, you’ll
see what I mean.
Walter
On Jul 30, 2011, at 1:41 PM, Walter Lee Davis wrote:
Ah, but that’s Flash, which won’t play on iPad or other iDevices.
Walter
On Jul 30, 2011, at 1:14 PM, Ginger Garnitz wrote:
Check out Crossword Forge http://www.solrobots.com/crosswordforge/index.html
I’ve not tried it, but it looks as though it would meet your need.
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Thanks everyone. I’ve now got lots to ponder on.
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