#1: Zeth Weissman (zethw) on Mar 19, 2008

First let me say thanks to Jan and become addicted to your site. I am a newcomer to the world of Paint By Number / Logic Art and it wasn't until seeing one in a puzzle magazine that I learned of the puzzle.

Being a developer, the first thing that I did, was make my own version. I started searching the web for puzzles to test and that was when I came across this site and decided my time would be better spent solving them then re-writing what Jan has already done.

Thanks to everyone for putting together such a great and FREE site with amazing puzzles. I would gladly donate to the site hosting costs if Jan is interested in getting a PayPal donation button setup.

My question...

Not sure if it is just me or not, but I have a very difficult time seeing the difference between the blue, green, and black square counters unless I am using the enlarged version of the puzzle. But for larger grids, it is not possible.

Instead of having just the text be the color, can change the images to make they background color be the color, and the number always be in white in the foreground? I think that would be much easier to read.

I'm sure that would take a long time to recreate all those images, so let me know if I can help.

Thanks again!

Zeth

I too have trouble seeing the difference between the green and the blue especially, and I agree on large puzzles I am simply lost for many reasons. Besides the color discrimination problem, I can't fit the puzzles on my screen (I've talked about that before here) and it is very frustrating. I'm about to run out of small enough puzzles to do on this site.... sigh... not sure what I'm going to do when that happens.

Make more smaller (40x40 or less) puzzles people!! :-)

Yeah, I have the same problems. My desk top system system has a huge monitor, so I can scale even large puzzles up enough so that I can tell black from blue, but these days, if I have desk time, then I need to spend it on paying work. I only solve puzzles while I am "watching the kids" which means the laptop, which is a very nice laptop, but it's too laborious to do big puzzles on it.

I agree that a lot could be done to make the number ties more readable. But until my work/family load ebbs a bit, webpbn is going to be running mostly on autopilot. I've spent the whole day today cleaning up the house in anticipation of my mother-in-law arriving to see her new grandson, which is worrying me, because I really need to get started on the first two of the five tax returns I file annually, never mind the work my clients want me to do. Argh!

I really, really will have time to take advantage of these fine suggestions someday though, including adding a "donate" buttton. Though honestly, the hosting costs are still pretty minimal for this site. I don't remember what it is, but it's under two hundred a year, which still counts as rather a cheap hobby. Still, costs will grow and I should start developing some mechanism to cover them.

I hope that you get to enjoy the upcoming visit with your mother-in-law, that all is going well with your beautiful children and you breeze through those dratted tax returns.

We'll be here when you get a chance to catch your breath. All is well. :)

Hey Jan,

If you need any help with running the site or development work, I am more than happy to offer my services. It's been awhile since I've done some cgi programming, but programming languages are pretty much the same and just got to re-remember the syntax. I'm sure that you have access of my email address from the registration. Let me know if I can help.

Hmmm. Interesting thought. I'd never really thought about getting help on the programming. That's the part I'm good at, and like doing, unlike the graphical design, which I'm mediocre at. Most of the programming is pretty easy. The CGIs are just Perl/MySQL stuff, and then there is lots and lots of Javascript. But to allow anyone else to work on it, I'd have to give access to the source code, and then I'd have to get into the whole complex business of deciding if I like what they did. Not too eager, really.

Part of the source code is already open source - the pbnsolve program, which does the automated check of puzzles for multiple solutions and sometimes for logical solvability. That's all in C and can be downloaded from the pbnsolve page. Improvements to the performance of that would be cool.

Another programming task that is a little bit separate from the core of the site is the puzzle printing code. Currently I'm using the perl library PDFAPI2 (I think that was it's name) to generate PDF files, but the files are absurdly large and take absurdly long to generate. I don't know if that is because PDF's are inherently stupid or what. I know I could generate a postscript file to print any puzzle on the site that wouldn't take up more than a kilobyte or two, and PDF is supposed to be based on postscript, so it ought to be possible to do something better. Anyway, finding better way to print puzzles would be neat.

However, I can't say that either of these are terribly high priority.

I know that it is hard to let others into your code. I always have a hard time with that as well and take no offense.

I think that we subscribe to the same newsletter. My motto is "I don't make it look pretty, I make it work" So again, it was quite obvious that it was a developer that put the site together. Streamline and functional. no images, little color, and no curves. Everything is in boxes. I like it!

Not too familiar with pdf generations. What is wrong with just hitting the print button and have it print the html? Haven't tried but assuming that it doesn't look good if that is not how you are doing it now.

i haven't had a problem, and with the way things are now (mouse-over description of what the color and number are) we could definitely include colors like orange and purple and possibly yellow. I do know that yellow would be the worst color to show up on a white background. maybe what would help that would be to have a light gray background with a much darker color when the column/row is finished.

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