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Comment by zwegner | Hacker News Reader

This is really nice! Very clean design, and a great puzzle too.

Two small interface suggestions: first, allow starting a line on any square, not just one with a number (the selection would be canceled if it doesn't connect to a square with a number). This would make selecting lines where the number is in the middle a bit less annoying, requiring only one swipe instead of two. Second, speed up the between-puzzle display a little. I'm an American with a very short attention span, I don't have all day to look at puzzle names :)

I also found a solver on GitHub using Z3 that looks pretty small and readable, if anyone is curious: https://github.com/redfast00/LinjatSolver

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Thank you for the feedback!

Regarding the first suggestion: that sounds interesting, I’ll give it a try.

For the second one: you can “skip” the puzzle name screen by tapping on it (see https://twitter.com/mazzarolomatteo/status/12033866772359905...). Does it fill still slow this way? I haven’t added any “tip” about the tapping on these screens in the app... I thought this could have been discovered by tapping on it while waiting but I might have been too optimistic.

Thanks for the reply!

After playing more, and switching from a trial-and-error/backtrack approach to a more deliberate style where I try to mentally prove each extension of a line, I feel less of a need for the start-line-anywhere thing. So, it's your call on whether that's worthwhile.

It would be nice to have undo/redo--I've made a couple mistakes, and in those cases I'd like to step back and check my work move by move. That might spoil the clean design a bit though!

The tap-to-skip is a good trick, thanks--no need to make other changes there.

I thought a bit about the undo, but as you already mentioned I’m not sure how to make it fit into the design of the app. Also, after playing several puzzles I noticed that if I made a mistake I would just prefer resetting the board, because it would be difficult pin-pointing the exact wrong move. I’ll create an issue of GitHub anyway to keep track of it!

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