If you’re correcting a word, it’s surprisingly easy to start in the wrong place as you type in the new letters, or end up going across when you wanted to go down. You can even choose to “pencil” in a clue before confidently entering it in “pen” mode. If you have a moment of genius, you can type in the answer in one go, or you can guess at a few letters - simply tap on the square and type the letter. To swap between vertical and horizontal clues, you tap again at the square. Tapping on a square will illuminate the clue in the grid, with the square you’ve chosen highlighted. The puzzle takes up most of the screen with clues revealed below. Whichever you choose, the app presents them all in Crosswords’ own interface. There’s even the option to import more puzzles that use a standard “.puz” file type or to buy bundles of puzzles from publishers. At $10, it’s expensive for an app, but it automatically loads a number of publicly available crossword puzzles from select sources - even drawing in The New York Times’ puzzle if you’re a subscriber - along with a decent list of free “starter puzzles.” You can view them either by date, source or difficulty (The Sydney Morning Herald’s cryptic is apparently the hardest). The Crosswords app, by Stand Alone, has established itself as the definitive source for puzzles for iOS and Android devices. It’s less fuss when you’re commuting, and you can get puzzles from around the world. Times have changed, and although crosswords are as popular as ever, the best way to do them nowadays is - surprise! - on a smartphone or tablet. It gave us a comfortable competitive feeling and it had nothing to do with our actual jobs of fiddling around with numbers on a computer. Later, my colleagues and I would noodle the word clues during coffee breaks, which was welcome mental exercise. Long ago, when I worked in an office, a vital morning task was to grab a freshly delivered newspaper from the executive suite’s welcome desk, slap it on a photocopier and copy the crossword puzzle before someone else started filling it in.
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