SudoCue Users

hi ruud,
can u have a option of time and hi-score

Well golly,
clueless helper is the only one with a timer.
all three programs could have one.

I think, it could be more responsive.
Like its completely manual now
it could start when you load a puzzle and stop if you havent touched it(active) for a minute.. start again on activate.
maybe add a minute when you get a hint
5 minutes on take a step.
and of course stop when puzzle is finished.

Hi score, i dont quite unnerstand, perhaps best solvetime?

I personally hate timers, so if you do add this feature, Ruud, please make it subtle and provide an option to hide it!

A good negative example is Sudoku Tiger, which I tried out, before getting totally irritated by this huge (36-point font?!) clock display that not only changes to the word "Helped!" after you've used a hint, but also insists on flashing it at you ad infinitum. Luckily, I don't suffer from epilepsy, otherwise I would have had to stick a bit of opaque tape over the corresponding part of the monitor!

Many people will be using the software not just to do a puzzle from scratch, but also to analyze and/or practice particular techniques, or to verify that they haven't missed an obvious step in a walkthrough, etc. In such cases, a timer is irrelevant.

Also, if no input has been made for a while, it doesn't necessarily mean that the user is absent. Indeed, in the case of Ruud's puzzles, the opposite is usually true - we're still there, scratching our heads, desperately trying to find that breakthrough move he had in mind! So, any timer feature would also require a "Pause" facility to allow the user to explicitly stop the clock in order to go out for a coffee, or whatever.

Another question to be answered is what to do when the user reloads a saved state. Most file formats don't store the elapsed time and, even if they did, reloading a saved state is like going back in time, the elapsed time between saving the state and reloading it effectively being lost. So it's not an exact science.