Puzzle Pal: Substring extractor

I was at BANG 33 yesterday, and one of the puzzles involved extracting words out of other words. We did the extraction by hand at the game, but today I set down at my desk and added a substring extractor to Puzzle Pal.

While I was at it, I also bundled the wordlist into the main app, and updated the UI to use action bar.

If you find Puzzle Pal useful, please review it on Google Play. You can also leave a comment here if you have ideas for other solvers and decoders.

Happy puzzling!

Puzzle Pal: Swap letter and ROT 13

In The Game a couple weeks ago, one of the puzzles involves replacing a letter in a word to form another word. To my horror Puzzle Pal didn't know how to solve it! I quickly added a new solver and posted an update to the Android Market.

While I was at it, I realized that Puzzle Pal also didn't have a ROT 13 decoder, useful for geocaching, so I added that as well.

Enjoy!

Puzzle Pal: Recompiled for tablets

One of the first things I did after winning an Android tablet from the AT&T hackathon was to download Puzzle Pal. It worked, but was only rendering itself in a teeny tiny window in the middle. Time to recompile it with the latest SDK so it knows what to do with tablets.

I thought all I needed to do was to recompile, but it still didn't expand to fill up the whole space. Turns out I need to tell it not to run under compatibility mode for tablets in uses-sdk in AndroidManifest.xml:

<uses-sdk 
  android:minSdkVersion="3" 
  android:targetSdkVersion="12" />

And then I ran into another issue: the sudoku grid was not accepting inputs. Not quite sure what changed between the SDK versions, but now the view needs to implement TextWatcher and update the grid onTextChanged.

I didn't get a chance to optimize the UI for tablets, so the Braille decoder looks a bit silly. In any case, please grab the latest version from Android Market and let me know if you run into issues.

Puzzle Pal: Sudoku Solver UI fixes

I did some fine tuning to the Sudoku Solver. The input grid is a subclass of EditText, and I override the onTouchEvent method to select a cell. After that I used to return false. I changed it to return super.onTouchEvent so that it brings up the soft keyboard when you tap anywhere on the grid.

I also changed the way I handle key events. Before I used getDisplayLabel() to determine the letter typed, which is incorrect since it only reflect the label on the keyboard, ignore key combinations. Now I use getNumber(), which confusingly also returns characters that are not numbers.

Puzzle Pal update: now with decoders!

I just uploaded Puzzle Pal v1.1.0 to Android Market. It has a new Decoders menu with three decoders: Braille, Morse Code and Semaphore.

All of the decoders have a buffered area to show decoded output, so you can just keep adding new symbols and see what it spells.