Notices

sounds fine to me...I use the reveal letter more and reveal word only when the better half is stuck and thinks I am smarter then I am...hehehehe....

of course a setting to swap solve/reveal word for reveal letter would not be a bad thing either....

Alright! Adding the "reveal letter" was fairly straightforward. In fact, I went a bit crazy and added "Check" / "Solve" / "Clear" for each of "Letter" / "Word" / "Puzzle". ("Clear" lets you totally cheat by getting rid of cheat marks. I know it's not in Across Lite, but I thought it was a neat feature.)

Additionally I have some good news for those of you that use the Xrandr (Screen Rotate) extension. I figured out how to position the onscreen keyboard Left/Right/Top/Bottom. That goes for the "Checks Buttons" as well, which are now independent of the keyboard. So you can now see both at the same time!

I'm heading out of town for Memorial Day weekend so I won't have a chance to release v.1.0.8 until mid-next-week. Future updates will be available through the maemo extras repository, but I'll certainly post an announcement here. (If you can't wait that long, you can always use the instructions on the xword homepage for getting the latest version from the garage.)

UPDATE! New version 1.0.8

Changes:

• Reformatted the 'Puzzle' menu. Now contains 'Check/Solve/Clear' for each of 'Letter/Word/Puzzle'.
• Split the 'Toolbar Layout' preference menu into 'Solution Buttons' and 'Onscreen Keyboard' menus, both of which can be turned off or shown on any side of the screen. Both have a (synchronized) timer button.
• The onscreen keyboard's Check/Solve Word buttons now support "tap-and-hold" to pop-up (Check/Solve) Letter/Word/Puzzle.

This new update should be available in the maemo extras repository soon, so check Application Manager for updates. Alternatively, you can download it from the garage. We made lots of little code changes in this release, so please post any bugs to this thread.

Here's a screen shot of the new 'Solution Buttons' and 'Onscreen Keyboard' when using a rotated screen. Notice the qwerty layout when the keyboard is placed top/bottom.

Thanks for the continual updates, I'm definitely getting a lot of mileage out of xword.

I did try to update to the latest version--application installed successfully, but it isn't loading for me. I deleted it and reinstalled, but still no luck.

It might be an issue with the configuration file. Try the troubleshooting section on the xword homepage to see if that fixes it.

If that doesn't fix it, please post your NIT model number and OS version.

Also, try starting the program from an xterm as "/usr/bin/xword" (without the quotes) to see if any error messages get printed.

Thanks for your help,

It looks like so far:
- I can get it to load when the configuration file is cleared out
- It won't let me load a puzzle from the program menu
- It will let me load a puzzle from file manager
- If I close out of the program, the program will not load if I try to run it again

I'm on a n800 on OS2008. Here is the error log from the last time I tried to run it in xterm (I attempted this after closing out of xword and not being let back in):

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/xword", line 2474, in <module>
w = PuzzleWindow(p)
File "/usr/bin/xword", line 1417, in __init__
self.do_open_file(self.last_file)
File "/usr/bin/xword", line 1477, in do_open_file
self.notify("Opened puzzle '" + self.puzzle.title + "'")
File "/usr/bin/xword", line 1552, in notify
hildon.hildon_banner_show_information(self.win, None, msg)
TypeError: hildon_banner_show_information() argument 2 must be string, not None

Aha! That answers the question. You have an older version of one of the python modules. I searched for "hildon_banner_show_information" and found that this bug was fixed a couple of months ago.

Go into Application Manager and select the menu "Tools->Refresh application list". Let it refresh. Then click the "Check for updates" button and select any updates you see there. (You should see a couple of python related updates.)

This problem is new because Brad (the lead developer) used hildon_banner_show_information since it gets around the issue of the information banner not showing correctly when you open a .puz file from the File Manager.

Thanks, updating Python did the trick.

Xword is looking really polished now--with some of the smaller changes with the recent couple of updates, it's starting to approximate the feel/ease of use of Across Lite Mobile. In fact I use xword on the tablet more than Across Lite on the smartphone these days--the larger screen on the tablet is a big plus...

Someone sent me a bug report about using xword with the LCARS theme. Apparently, the theme sets the background of buttons to the color black, but the on-screen keyboard letters in xword are also black. This makes the keyboard completely useless. I tried to find a programmatic way of fixing this. Basically I added a hack to set the background of the keyboard to white, but it's not an ideal solution and is frowned upon by GTK programming standards.

Fortunately, I found a supported way around the problem. GTK allows you to set a theme on a per application basis. If you have Personal Menu installed, you can set a command to launch xword with a default theme (with white buttons). In Personal Menu, create a new command entitled "Xword" and enter the following in the "Command to execute" field:
When you launch xword with this 'shortcut', buttons will be displayed with the default theme 'echo'. (You could also replace 'echo' above with one of the other built-in themes, like 'felicia' or 'glasser'.)

Great app. Thanks for your work on this. Between Xword and EightyOne, I have my gaming fix.