#1: Jill Tallmer (Yidl) on Dec 10, 2018

Very often when I access webpbn on my iPad, I am unable to work on a puzzle because each time I touch a pixel, the keyboard comes up and blocks the puzzle. If I turn the iPad off and then back on, the problem may go away. Does anyone have a fix?

Jill / Yidl

Hm. Jan thought often about how to make the site work with a touch-screen, but never found a solution that he was happy with. So unfortunately the answer may be to use a desktop computer.

I'd love to make this work better with a touch-screen. Someday I will read up about options, but it may be a long time yet.

My thoughts on touch screens:
The biggest problem with doing this on a touch screen is the lack of mouse buttons on my finger. When I solve I switch often between one or more colors and white. This quickly becomes tedious with just one "tap" instead of left-click, middle-click, right-click. The other problem with touch is being able to only do one pixel at a time.


My solution to that would be to take advantage of the current omnipresence of multi-touch screens.

Put a color palette on the side of the screen. Touch1 would be your off-side thumb on a color (or white/bkgd, or unsolved) and then Touch2 would be a touch or swipe on the puzzle that would color in the pixels under the touch/swipe.
Then if you're not touching a color in the palette, a swipe would move the puzzle and pinch would zoom.

For those who like to solve one-handed, There could be a switch to make the palette into radio-button mode with an additional button for pan/zoom.

It would also be good to make the palette able to switch sides for southpaws.


Hmm. That presupposes that browsers let you access multi-touch. (I have no idea if they do or not.) Otherwise this would only work if you wrote an app.

I tried solving puzzles on my iPad, but I quickly tired of the tap-tap required to get to black. I only attempted B&W puzzles that were 20x20 or smaller, but even then I constantly had "He Lives" stuck in my head, from the double taps. (I*serve a*ris -en*Sav -ior, He's*in the*world to*day...)

I do all my puzzles on an iPad and don’t have this problem. The keyboard only comes up if I am in a comment box. Not sure why it would be different.

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