Last week, the only event that attracted my notice was Will Shortz’s unusual announcement to the New York Times submitters of yesterday, today and tomorrow. But this week, a few more items crossed the desk…
Vic Fleming tallied up a list of especially clever crossword clues, while Jim Horne calculated the most common crossword clues of Will Shortz’s New York Times era.
“The Crickler,” a little bit crossword, a little bit anacrostic, and a little bit its own animal, has knocked the New York Times off the top of Apple’s “most downloaded puzzle app” list. Michael Crick, the 71-year-old inventor, has a resume that includes Microsoft’s spell checker, The Sims and John Madden Football. Cricklers for multiple devices, including desktops, can be found here.
The Washington-Post has launched a new online games section. And Nintendo has announced a “Crosswords Plus” game, coming October 1.
(I’m doing this in a bit of a rush tonight, so if any errors or omissions have crept in, please have patience, and I’ll correct them soon after being told.)
Can’t stand the new WP games section. Lousy design, terrible fonts, badly laid out print versions. Never mind the mandatory ads.
thanks for this summary! It’s wonderful. I don’t know where I’ve been, but I didn’t know about The Crickler. I downloaded it, and I may be on my way to a new addiction.
Not only can’t I stand the new Washington Post games section, ugly beyond words as dhunter pointed out, but they have taken away our ability to download ahead of time the Sunday Post Puzzler edited by Peter Gordon, one of my favorites. Since I am one of the slow solvers and I am flying this week, I had hoped to take as many as would have been available under the old regime to work between naps on the plane, but alas, it’s no longer possible.
Also, the totally awesome XWord open source crossword solving app (PC only) has been updated, and everyone on a PC should be using it.
Hope you’ll keep these wrap ups coming…thanks for the heads up on Crickler!
Alex, I’m gonna opt to push the XWord story to the following week, and do the same with any other such additions that fall more than a few hours after the original news post (unless they’re really big items like Lollapuzzoola). I think they’ll get more attention that way.