7 by many revamp

[auntiemo]

I love the changes already. Thank you Alan.

[Alan W]

Blackrockrose, I did forget to mention the checkbox. But, if you had looked at the two screen prints I included in my original post as if it was a "spot the differences" puzzle, you could have noticed there was a box ticked in one image and not in the other!

TRex, to be honest I'm not sure when I decided to drop the upper case type for the big words. I've been working on this for quite a while and trying to juggle changes in different versions. I'm pretty sure the font hasn't changed: it's specified as "Verdana, sans-serif", but precisely which font is used is up to the browser and operating system. On the other hand, the font of the letters on the blue and yellow tiles is different. It's from Google Fonts and it's called "IBM Plex Sans Condensed". I chose it because it's quite narrow, even the M and W, so I could make the tiles tall and thin.

I think the longest word that can ever be played is 16 letters. By sheer coincidence it came up in yesterday's 7bm puzzle: antitotalitarian. There are thousands of longer words in our lexicon now, but they all have more than seven different letters. But to be on the safe side, it is possible to play more letters - if a 17th letter is played everything up there shrinks to make room for up to eight more letters.

[jancsika]

Thanks also for the ability to choose letters for a 7-by-many puzzle. Now if I could only remember the words I wanted to try in that format (darned old brain)!

Agreed.Thanks Alan! There is one seed word I'd been wanting to try for a while and as it turned out it yields over 130 common words and a whopping 9 big common words. That'll keep me busy for a while!

The only slight criticism that I'd have of the new format is that, as a smartphone user, the letters are somehow harder to tap. But this might just be a question of habit and I'll probably get used to the new layout in a couple of days!

[Calilasseia]

Sadly I'm still waiting to see the full features appear on my tablet, though this might change after a reboot ... which is a pity, because this change is EXACTLY what I've been hoping to see happen ever since the launch of 7 By Many!!!

[Alan W]

Cal, if you've noticed some changes, but still can't manipulate the letters in the 7bm puzzle, you probably need to tick the new checkbox near the top of the display, labeled "Show letters as tiles". See the two screen shots posted at the start of this thread.

[Calilasseia]

Cal, if you've noticed some changes, but still can't manipulate the letters in the 7bm puzzle, you probably need to tick the new checkbox near the top of the display, labeled "Show letters as tiles". See the two screen shots posted at the start of this thread.

Found out about this about 20 mins ago, and it works as planned on my tablet, even though said tablet is throwing its toys out of the pram in a manner suggesting that a factory reset is on the cards ...

[Calilasseia]

UPDATE:

Fired up the laptop. Had to do a CTRL-F5 to clear the cache to see the check box, but once it appeared, it worked.  So I now know this works on my Windows 7 laptop and my Android tablet.

Feature works as intended. I think Alan deserves a bottle of champers and a large Black Forest Gateau as a reward.

[cmh]

All seems OK on my kit too. Thanks Alan

[Ozzyjack]

The revamp works well on any of the machines and browsers I use and is a great improvement. Thanks.

[yelnats]

I LOVE IT!

I just had a word that was one letter longer than the normal tiles and the tiles got smaller and added 8 more!

You're pure genius Alan.

[ridethetalk]

Alan, do you have any way of checking to see whether people uniformly prefer the "Show letters as tiles" - my guess is this will probably be the universally preferred style. it's made the 7bm so much easier to negotiate - at least from the pov of usability... 

[Alan W]

No, I didn't set up anything to monitor people's preferences.

In earlier discussions a few players using mobile phones wanted the word under construction to be as compact as possible. The non-tiles view uses slightly less space for any given word, so some people may be sticking with that option for that reason. Also, some players may not have noticed that there is an option - at present the default is the text string view.