Just Crosswords
This book is largely my gift to humanity, but I can't deny that it has selfish undertones. I'm cashing the advance checks, for one. For another, I'm slinging in a chapter on crosswords because I'm interpreting my self-imposed mandate "take everything from your personal and professional life and put it on your iPhone" and doing a simple swap of personal pronouns.
I love crosswords. I try to do several a week. It gives me all the ben-efits of a game (procrastination, spending money on a lonely, isolating activity) with the expectation that the brain cells I fry will be outweighed by the number of new synaptic pathways I form while trying to figure out a three-letter word for "Shovels can be these, blankly" that starts with a Q.
Solutions for putting crossword puzzles on an iPhone settle into two options: a single iPhone app that's a great puzzle downloader for many difference puzzle sources, and the dedicated apps pushed out by the publishers of certain blue-chip and quasi-blue-chip daily crosswords.
Crosswords by Stand Alone (www.standalone.com) is my favorite crossword app for the iPhone. It's truly one-stop shopping. It connects to several online sources of free, daily and weekly crosswords, and can keep you rolling in brain-wranglers indefinitely. Just tap on a puzzle and it arrives on your iPhone in moments (see Figure 12-1). If you have a specific favorite provider, you can simply "subscribe" to those puzzles and they'll automatically be downloaded every time the app launches.
Stand Alone really gets how an app like this should function. At launch, it checks the Net and shows me all the new puzzles of which it's aware. Alternatively, I can sort the list by source.
The second Big Win is the glorious game-play. The puzzle works in either vertical or horizontal orientation. And when you tilt the iPhone on its side you get a rather majestic view that combines clues, puzzle grid, and keyboard (see Figure 12-2).
Every user control you'd expect in an iPhone app is available. Pinch and stretch the puzzle to zoom in and out, hold down a finger to call up a magnifying glass, scroll all over creation if you like. A Sunday crossword is a bit of a trial for any small screen like the iPhone's, but Stand Alone's Crosswords manages this set of problems with far greater elegance and creativity than any other handheld app. It even lets you dispense with the grid entirely, and work the puzzle as a simple set of linear clues (as shown in Figure 12-3).
And it truly respects players of all skill levels. Those of us who have never bothered to memorize all the tributaries of the Rhone can get hints (either the entire answer to a stumper, of just an individual letter). Those of us who sneered at the concept of "hints" and now need to wipe the inevitable ejected fury-fueled spittle off this page will be encouraged to find that there's formal scorekeeping and timing, and the ability to compare your times against your previous performances and those of other users across the world.
Finally, it's the only app that allows you to load up arbitrary puzzles. There's only one popular file format for digital crossword puzzles: Across Lite (.puz) format. Crosswords can download any arbitrary .puz file. Just tap the + (plus) button to add puzzles, click the Browse for Puzzles button, and type in the URL of the puzzle file.
The New York Times offers its famous crossword puzzles online via subscription. Crosswords can access your account and use this subscription material alongside all of the app's "free" puzzle sources. Just add your New York Times account name and password (for the Times and certain other subscription services) via the app's Settings page.
Some of you might be puzzle snobs. You've tried Stand Alone's app but as soon as you noticed that the People magazine crossword was among the app's offerings ("3. Who's the Boss star Tony _____") your nose hairs curled, and you bailed.
The New York Times has licensed Magmic to create an official daily puzzle app for the iPhone. It features many of the same features as Stand Alone's Crosswords but isn't nearly as full-featured, overall (see Figure 12-4). It does offer a logistical advantage in that it allows for in-app purchases of new puzzles.
In 2010, in fact, the app is going to an all-subscription model. The app itself is just a buck or two, but to get real puzzles, you'll need to buy a subscription pass for a month, a year, of half a year's worth of regular content. Plus, it plugs you into a social community of (specifically) New York Times puzzle solvers. If you're such a metropolitan egghead that you hire a neighborhood kid who comes around the house once a week to replace the leather elbow patches on your tweed jackets, this might be the right app for you.
There's science out there that claims that solving crossword puzzles is in fact a positive daily exercise for your brain. It keeps the juices flowing to both the penthouse and low-rent districts of both lobes and thus can help to stave off a multitude of hugely-scary progressive disorders.
I dunno. I suppose if I solved as many puzzles as I abandoned, I might be in a position to evaluate the science from a rational perspective. As is, I stack up my experience with Crosswords against the three racing games I own and I must confess that I've benefited far more from the former than the latter. I know, for example that a montane is the region of a mountain below the treeline. All I learned from Real Racing is that if in real life I'd bought myself a Lamborghini Gallardo five years ago instead of a four-door Mercury Sable, I probably would have killed myself and countless others within 40 yards of the dealer's lot.
