Hi everyone - posted about this in my regular thread, @Saimin suggested I create a stand-alone one.
I have long periods of Japanese inactivity, and I worry about my burned items rotting. I have a really hard time doing flashcards to start with, so I wrote this. It takes your burned items and composes a crossword with them:
That demo is about as much documentation as exists at the moment. The program is written in Dart/Flutter (my first), which means it builds as a native windows app, but can also compile to Javascript for use in the browser. The demo footage has it running in Chrome.
Hiragana / Katakana entered directly through the IME cause some weird effects in flutter - the program uses a dart port of WaniKaniâs own WanaKana library, so you can just type roman letters and you should get automatic conversion to whatever that square is looking for. (Digraphs such as ăă will be spilled to an adjacent square if possible.)
I have put it up here on Github Pages but it still has a lot of features I would like to add (and which I am unfortunately running out of time to do.) The two most important ones are:
Persisting the userâs token between sessions.
Being able to backspace properly, and keyboard based navigation generally.
Repository here. Bonus content includes me checking in an API token in the comments and then having to expire it.
I love crossword puzzles! Iâm defo giving this app a try later! ^>^
Edit:
A couple of suggestions:
-being able to restrict number of items fetched and so the size of the crossword puzzle
-being able to restrict from which levels, the items are fetched and so the difficulty of the crossword puzzle
But I really like it! ^>^
Edit 2:
it seems that when you fill in intersecting words, the pointer continues onto the next one, erasing your previous answer, forcing you to retype. (i.e. moving from down â across, overwriting the previous answer here. The first character is erased, and when filling it in again, the marker moves to erase the next character)
Although I have no burned items yet as I am only level 3, I find this really cool! Good job, I canât wait to see what the future holds for you and your app :).
Really looks interesting! Can others also contribute to it? Or do you plan to do it as a solo project?
(I donât know anything about flutter but I would be interested to try!)
Thanks @ekg - thatâs good feedback! Iâll look into adding an options screen at some point.
For the intersecting words, yes, I think I see what you mean (the going âaround the cornerâ problem). This is part of what I meant about wanting to redo some of the navigation. At the moment, navigation works like this:
Summary
The crossword has an internal travel direction that is âtrying to go downâ or âtrying to go rightâ. It gets set when you click on a clue of the appropriate type.
Whenever you fill a square, it tries to move the cursor. The travel direction is only a preference, so if you are âtrying to go downâ but there is no square below, you will still go right if possible. Afterwards, the crossword will change its âtrying to goâ status to match whatever you just did.
Whenever you move in this way, you clear the square youâre landing in (so I can just type the whole word from beginning to end from the first position.)
As youâve noticed, this creates a problem when you have something happen like this:
Iâm spent a bit of time thinking about what the right behaviour should be, and Iâve now made some changes. The short version is, traversal should not scrub the square you arrive at if you got there by changing directions. Also, clicking in a cell should not clear it (or any other cells), but clicking on a clue should still clear the first cell for you to type into.
There are still some bugs. If you click directly into a cell, what happens after you type your next character might be different depending on what your travel direction was (from your previous play), as this will affect whether or not the program thinks you changed directions. But I think it is a bit of an improvement over the old navigation code, so I have pushed it to the live version - it took a bit of fiddling for Firefox to stop caching the old version, but it worked straight away in Chrome. Perhaps a cleaner solution would just be to select the contents of the square whenever it becomes focused. Or I just really need to get arrow-key navigation up and running.
(edit: 30 seconds after sending it live - it kills digraph propagation, groan - youâll have to type your ăăs with ki + xyo. fixed, I think)
@Tantivy - thank you! @sakuchu - please, feel free - the code is MIT licensed, so feel free to make changes, make your own version, or make suggestions. Iâm a git novice, but Iâll eventually work out how to e.g. accept pull requests.
Pretty cool! It would be nice for the selected square to stand out a bit (a coloured outline, different colour background, anything to make it easier to find), and also to have a button to âfinishâ (show the answers for any not already filled out).
But overall great work!
yeah, moving around with keys would be nice i think even if nothing else, being able to backspace delete would be great
minor thing but is it possible to make the crossword itself fit the screen? iâm okay with scrolling through clues if thatâs the compromise
i agree with @ekg on the restrictions of size too, itâs nice having so many burned items to review at once, but i can also see it being too many sometimes and being able to limit it would force me to do them all in the time i have, rather than just doing the ones i know and skipping the rest
is there a way of showing when youâve got a word (in)correct rather than the score? like highlighted in some way, or a colour change? i can see it being difficult to work out which one youâve got wrong sometimes otherwise
other than those minor things (most of which are just personal preference), itâs great! very helpful, and i see myself using this in the future!
Iâve built something sort-of-similar - a toggle that shows the correct answers beneath the text entry area (almost like anti-Furigana). Combined with the selection highlight, it looks like this:
This required a fairly fundamental change to the way the program works, so I am going to hold these changes a tiny bit longer for testing.
(I agree about the other two things as well.) Forcing the crossword not to spill off the bottom of the screen (is that what you mean?) should be possible - a screenshot would help me be sure Iâm understanding correctly. In terms of tagging incorrect letters (tagging the whole word, or the clue, would require a lot more rerigging), yes, something like this:
I will try and push this at the same time as the other two changes.
Ouch. Currently the clue list is shuffled and cut down to 250 items maximum - the way this works at the moment is that you might get a different 250 items in each re-flow of the puzzle (and it never manages to get all 250 onto the grid anyway, which is sized to twice the length of the longest answer + 1). But in light of this, I will need to cut it down during the initial request. If I add a puzzle size parameter x, we attempt to fetch 4x random items from the burnlist, randomly select 1/4 of them, and attempt to fit them.
Unfortunately I still havenât been able to get this to behave the way Iâd like (layout is confusing), but I have pushed out the following changes:
amber highlight for the currently focused square;
incorrect answers filled with pink instead of being cleared (move focus through them to set them back to normal);
a âhint modeâ toggle (the â?â icon on the top bar);
login screen now also prompts you for a âpuzzle scale.â
Explanation of what Puzzle Scale does
Your generated crossword will never have more than âPuzzle Scaleâ questions on it.
Puzzle Scale also affects how the program talks to the API. When you log in, the program gets a list of ID numbers for all of your burned items. This information comes back from the API fairly quickly even if you have lots of burned items, but it doesnât include the item characters / readings / meaning.
After this list is retrieved, the program randomises its order and then picks Puzzle Scale * 4 items to get detailed information for. The detailed information can be retrieved 100 items at a time. Not all the items are kept - if the reading is only one or two characters long it is discarded.
So if your Puzzle Scale is 20, when you enter your API key the program will attempt to get detailed information for 80 items. These are shuffled and fit to the grid until nothing more can be fit on, or 20 items are placed. The program keeps doing this over and over again for 600ms, finally giving you the result that had the most items placed on the board / the most intersections.
Hopefully this wonât cause any weird behaviour because a lot changed, but if it does, let me know.
edit: @nyxqueenofshadows - hopefully the puzzle should be resizing properly now.
it also works with 8000 burned items now, thanks! ^^
I was a bit surprised that I had to click on âLayout puzzleâ when it still said âRequesting your burned itemsâ, but no biggie.
Minor bug:
Sometimes parts of font glyphs are cut off.
Not sure if thatâs due to my setup (Chrome/Win, though Iâve never seen it elsewhere), and it mostly doesnât matter much, though on some kanji it can make it hard to read. (not the above though)
Sometimes it corrected itself by hovering over the text, though not here.
This may be the last update for a little while, but I have updated this to 0.01:
an attempt at keyboard navigation (arrow keys plus backspace). Delete-and-move-to-previous (delete on an empty square) is reliant on knowing which way it thinks you are going, so it might not know what to do (and do nothing) if you click into a corner instead of getting there by typing or the question menu.
moving into a square now selects it instead of clearing it, so you donât have to commit to retyping the whole word.
rewrote a lot of the guts in the hope of being able to make the UI stateless but wasnât quite able to close the deal on the last few parts.
some long sequences of romaji necessary to express sutegana may hit the box character limit (stuff like happyou for ăŻăŁă´ăă). It may be easier in the short term just to type these as e.g. âhaxtupyouâ. Youâll work it out.
version number is now up in the page title, so if yours doesnât look like this you may need to refresh it:
A bunch of the new keyboard navigation stuff may behave weirdly in the English âloading puzzlesâ or if you use an IME to enter your Japanese - there are some tricky bits about handling input in this framework (as it is optimised more towards just writing stuff than looking at it keypress by keypress). By using its built in converter, it means that it will always know when youâre changing a square. It all seems to work properly on the main, Japanese, part of the puzzles.
(i.e. moving from down â across, overwriting the previous answer here. The first character is erased, and when filling it in again, the marker moves to erase the next character)
