#1: John Macdonald (perlwolf) on Mar 12, 2011
I generally don't bother with puzzles that have no white in them. I start to fill them out, just to see the image, but when there is a lot of fiddly stuff to fill in and no challenge to figuring out what is needed, I quickly just abandon the puzzle.
Could you the enhance the h/v fill functions so that if there is only one possible way of filling in the remaining squares in a row, they just get filled in? (Maybe make it H and V instead of h and v to signify that it will fill in the entire row or nothing rather than the current empty span of nothing.
Something like:
if ( total colour clues == total colour filled in )
set all unfilled cells to white
else if ( (total colour clues) - (total colour filled in) == (total unfilled cells)
set all unfilled cells to appropriate colour
So, once you if you have filled in all of the colour, this function will fill in the remaining white cells, or if you have filled in all the white cells, this function will colour in all the remaining unknown cells with the right colour.
Filling in the remaining white simplifies cleaning up a known row - instead of having to click on the ends of each range of "unknown" cells and then h/v to fill in the rest of the range, and having to go to every block of unknowns and fill them in separately, the whole operation would be a single step.
For the non-puzzle puzzles (with no white, so there is only work but no puzzle in solving them) this would make seeing the picture trivial - just use H on each row, or V on each column.
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