Posted 5th Oct 2012 at 09:16Is there a possibility to revert to the old player? because i really miss the right-click method for entering clear segments :(

Posted 5th Oct 2012 at 11:47Hi dreampainter,

Okay, so if that isn't working for you there's a bug - it certainly works in current versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox on a PC.

Can you let me know exactly what browser you're using (and version) on what type of computer? Do you see the touch panel on the right or do you have the regular panel on the right?

And just to be sure, you don't have a touch screen on your machine? (Not that that is supposed to effect it)

Gareth, puzzlemix

Posted 5th Oct 2012 at 12:35I've added some code to 'turn off' the touch-screen shaded/clear button states when you click the mouse. Has that helped? But please do let me know the answers to the above questions too.

Gareth, puzzlemix

Posted 6th Oct 2012 at 23:22Hi gareth,

The functionality of using a mouse with right-click to input clear segments works again (Yay!!)
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However with testing whether mouse works in a sudoku puzzle, it wont select a square with the mouse.
This doesnt work in chrome(up to date), and firefox (15.01) but does work in internet explorer(9).

Im using a lenovo thinkpad x230t with mouse, touch and pen. Touch works as advertised, but mouse and pen does not.

Hope this helps.

Posted 9th Oct 2012 at 15:57Hi dreampainter,
Sorry about that - I think I've now fixed this so if you have both touch and mouse then you should still be able to use the mouse perfectly on all puzzles.

If this isn't the case please let me know again - but I do think I have now fixed it.

Thanks for pointing this out! (How interesting it worked in Internet Explorer - that suggests it behaves like Mobile Safari in terms of mapping touch to clicks, which the other desktop browsers clearly don't do).

Gareth, puzzlemix

Posted 9th Oct 2012 at 18:10
Last edited by dreampainter 9th Oct 2012 at 18:12Hi gareth,

In chrome everything works(touch mouse and pen) in slitherlink and in sudoku/kakuro

in firefox sudoku/kakuro works with touch, mouse and pen. but slitherlink has a problem. pen and mouse work(nice solution turning off clear/shaded touch buttons) but when using touch, every touch event results in a shaded segment, even when the clear button was pressed just before. this is also the case for hanji.

in internet explorer the puzzle players somehow reverted to the old interface: no numbers for sudoku/kakuro. no buttons for clear/shaded in slitherlink/hanji

Am i correct in thinking that you use different players for every browser? or do you use one player, but with interfaces for every browser?

hope this helps

Posted 9th Oct 2012 at 19:07Hi dreampainter,
First of all, thank you very much for testing all of those.

It is one player and it uses exactly the same code in all browsers now, so any differences are down to the browser behaviour.

The player uses Modernizr to detect whether the browser supports touch events (this is supposed to be entirely reliable), and if it does it switches on the touch panel on the right and registers handlers for touch events. So if the panel doesn't automatically appear, touch events won't be being used either - they will be handled as mouse events, which are much slower and will not allow dragging in the shading players (nor the option to place unshaded cells).

I haven't changed whether the panel appears for Internet Explorer - today I only added back in the click handlers for the number entry players when touch is enabled - so I suspect Internet Explorer is not supporting touch and simply is behaving as it has always done. Do you know what version you have? So far as I can see Internet Explorer does not yet support the standard HTML touch events but has browser-specific Microsoft events - I won't handle these because it is a very minority case which will resolve itself given time anyway.

If the touch is not working properly (always shaded) in Firefox then I think this means it is not handling the touch event - it is detecting the touch using the mouse handler instead which assumes the left-button is down unless it knows otherwise.

Can you do a test for me - can you drag to shade multiple areas in Firefox using touch? Does this work? If you can then I believe it is firing the touchstart event after the mousedown event and in all honestly I am not sure what I can do about that when on computers with both touch and mouse - sounds like a bad design in Firefox because that means I can't detect immediately which is being used without doing some nasty delaying-and-seeing tactics.

Thank you!

Gareth, puzzlemix

Posted 9th Oct 2012 at 19:47Okay, I realised the way I changed the touch and click support for number-entry today had had the effect of meaning you couldn't scroll number-entry puzzles once you zoomed in on a touch device. So I had to revert that change, but I've put in a different one which checks for double touches on a cell (touch + click). Unfortunately this in turn is not nice on the iPad/iPhone because the browser flashes a black rectangle over the cell to indicate the 'click'. This is horrible, so it now does device detection to disable the click handler on tablets and phones. This won't be absolutely perfect but should cover all major devices.

So in short if you spot any problems please let me know exactly what device you are using and in what browser.

Meanwhile Firefox on Android works okay for touch events, so maybe it will be fixed on the desktop too? What version do you have, dreampainter?

Posted 10th Oct 2012 at 05:34After the change in the interface, the area to click for a border became too narrow, and it's hard to hit the right space. It affects the time I take to solve it, since I have to keep track of where exactly to click. Can you add some "tolerance" area?

Posted 10th Oct 2012 at 08:56The border click area hasn't changed - in fact it has become marginally bigger recently since the puzzle is scaled slightly larger.

But I completely agree it is hard to click on the lines, and always has been unfortunately. There is a tolerance area but it's set to the width/height of the grid square joins because the underlying HTML elements have to be rectangular - if I increased this they'd overlap and it would be 'random' which line segment lit up if you clicked near the edges. One option would be to add another, larger sensing area in the middle of each bar.

However there is an easy work around - instead of clicking, hold down your mouse button and drag across the bar you want to light up. This works reliably, and is how I always solve these.

I would like to make this easier to use at some point - a visual indication when over a bar would help, for example, and shouldn't really be too hard to add to the mouse interface.

Gareth, puzzlemix

Posted 11th Oct 2012 at 13:26Hi gareth,

I tested the drag thing in firefox(15.0.1, latest version) using the sample hanji puzzle on your homepage and i can shade multiple squares in one drag.

furthermore, im happy to help people implementing touch on puzzles. especially since i have a touch laptop :)

hope this helps

Posted 3rd Jan 2013 at 10:47cool

Posted 7th Sep 2013 at 01:51I've now fixed touchscreen behaviour on PCs, or at least considerably improved it. You now get the proper PC interface.

See here for info.