Minor updates to XWord Info happen all the time. Here’s a recap of some recent changes you might not have noticed.
Improved Finder
When the Finder times out because the server is busy or because your query is too complex, you used to get nothing. Now, I show the partial results I’ve collected along with a warning that results are probably incomplete. This is often enough to be useful anyway.
Improved Clue Search
Searching Clues is more popular than I imagined. It finds the first occurrence of a clue, or partial clue, in each puzzle. Why only the first? It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’ve received many requests to show all the occurrences, not just the first. So now I do.
Here’s a reminder of the various options on that page:
- Match upper and lower case means capitalization matters.
- Ignore case means upper- and lower-case don’t count.
- Ignore case and diacritics means entering “resume” will also find “résumé” (with accents.)
- Match as word means typing “and” will find “you and me” but not “bandstand”.
- Match complete clue finds only matches where the whole clue has been entered. Punctuation and case are ignored.
Pictures in clues
Now that NYT crossword presentation is getting more ambitious, they sometimes include not just text, but even pictures in the clues. I thought it would be fun to see a running list of all the images used.
Oldest constructors
XWord Info has long tracked teenage constructors, but now there’s a page that lists the oldest known constructors at the time of their most recent published crossword.
Chart updates
There have been several minor enhancements to various charts. The most interesting is the Percentage of Crosswords by Women, by Day of Week.
Seven days of the week are represented by seven colors and the chart is confusing. Well, it’s a mess. You can now zero in on what you care most about by clicking the colors in the legend to remove or add each line. Maybe you want to focus on Friday and Saturday themeless, for example.
Up next
My next post will be on the best way to solve Cryptic Crosswords. Stay tuned.