Introducing GNOME Crosswords

GNOME Crosswords

Howdy folks! I want to announce a game for GNOME that I’ve been working on for a few months.

I’ve always enjoyed solving Crossword puzzles. It’s something I grew up doing as a kid, and we continue to do them as a family at the dinner table at night. I’ve wanted to try my hand at writing crosswords for a while, but there isn’t really a good tool available for doing so, and certainly no free software ones that work well with a recent GNOME release. I recently bought myself a lovely new Fedora-loaded Lenovo, and after it arrived, I thought I’d take a shot at writing such a tool.

Over the past four months or so I managed to get something worth releasing. The code is available here. It should build on relatively recent Linux distributions, though it does need libadwaita from git (toasts!). I also put together a flatpak file for testing here (no repo yet, as getting that set up defeated me). Once I’m more confident that the puzzles are solvable and fun I plan to publish it to flathub.

A dog's day
Non-traditional grid
Guardian cryptic No 28,605
The Guardian Daily Cryptic with reveal answers enabled

Features:

It’s still early, but it already has some fun features:

  • Puzzle Sets. The heart of the game is the Puzzle Set. It’s a collection of crossword puzzles that are tied together by a theme. Solving a puzzle unlocks more puzzles. I currently have one puzzle set (“Cats and Dogs”) with nine puzzles in it, but I have a few more puzzle sets planned. It contains mostly traditional puzzles, but I threw in a cryptic to keep people on their toes.
  • Nontraditional shapes and styles: I wanted to make something a bit little more whimsical and fun, as well as the more traditional puzzle grids. So I added support for colors and shapes as well. My son had fun doing pixel art to create some of the grids.
  • Reveal mistakes: For when you get stuck! It also supports checksums for puzzles that don’t include the solution.
  • Scalable grid: Currently the UI only exposes four sizes, but we have all the pieces to scale crosswords to different sizes.
  • Support for the .ipuz spec: This spec supports a ton of things, and I don’t support it fully yet, but most of the crossword part of the spec is included. There aren’t a ton of .ipuz files floating around, but you can use puzzlepull to download the Guardian Daily puzzle if you want to try some other examples.
Puzzle Set
The first Puzzle Set

Crossword Editor

GNOME Crosswords Editor

As part of building this app, I realized that creating grids was as big a part of the app as writing the actual game itself. To facilitate that, I started writing a crossword editor as well. It’s in the early stages, but it already has one of the most important features: a tool to create the initial grid. Making puzzles that fit well together is surprisingly hard. To make it easier, I wrote a crossword solver that quickly suggests words to fill in the grid. I’m proud of the design – it’s able to efficiently suggest options out of a list of 500K words really quickly (<1 μs on my machine). I was able to use it to build an autofill dialog that can recursively fill in a section of the puzzle when making a grid.

I still have more work to do on the editor and it’s clear that the autofill dialog isn’t a panacea, but it helped me figure out out some tricky corners. Here’s a video of the autofill dialog in action:

Thanks

I especially want to thank Rosanna and my kids for play-testing this and suggesting clues, as well as their patience while I was writing it. Thanks also to Federico for giving great advice, great code, and for being a star. Matthias for helping me relearn GTK and explaining GtkIMContext. Also, the example code in GNOME Builder was immensely helpful for getting this started.

What’s next?

There are a ton of features I’d like to add to this game. It really needs printing support, which should be relatively easy. I’d also love to see it get internationalized (and not just translated) – are crosswords in non-Latin languages a thing? And I’ve seen enough of Benjamin‘s GUADEC presentations over the years to know GTK can do something cooler than popup a dialog when you finish a crossword.

But the most important thing is that the game needs to be fun! For that, we need more puzzles and the existing puzzles need to be better. If you’re interested in joining me in creating a good set of puzzles for Linux, try the game out and let me know.

GNOME POPULUM EST

I gave a talk on the History of GNOME for GUADEC 2017. (Slides are available here, and hopefully the video feed will be posted soon.) It was a great trip down memory lane, and I really enjoyed putting this talk together. I didn’t include my final thoughts in the slide so I thought I’d include them in this post:

  1. First, we didn’t appreciate how much work this was  when we started. We have totally beaten win95, but the expectations bar has risen every year
  2. We have done a helluvalot of great work, and largely kept pace with expectations. This has been an amazing accomplishment and we should be proud of what we’ve done.
  3. The future for GNOME is more important and more promising then it has ever been

Endless and GNOME

Hello! Long time, no post.

Endless + GNOME = Love
Credit to Georges Stavracas

As you may have heard, Endless joined the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board last week.  We appreciate all the kind words of welcome we have received and are looking forward to strengthening our ties with this community. This has been a coming for a bit, and I’m looking forward for us to contribute more over the coming year!

On a personal note, this is really exciting to me. It’s been a couple years since I’ve had the pleasure of being on the Advisory Board, and I’m looking forward to working with the Board again. I’ve wanted to bring the two organizations closer for a while, and we got a glimpse of what was possible at the Design Hackfest in Rio last month.

Who we are and what we do:

Quite simply, we are trying to empower the world! Our mission is to make computing universally accessible, and to solve the barriers of cost and connectivity to the entire world. It’s a bold and ambitious goal, but we are absolutely serious about accomplishing this. There are billions of people who don’t have access to a computer, and would love to have one.

What’s that mean in practical terms? It means we are making a great computer that works at as low a price as we can make. It means constantly keeping an eye on cost while still providing a great value and experience to our users. It means that we want to provide a great OS and fantastic desktop to our users.

20160204140930
Wiring in Rocinha.

And it means that we have to think about a lot of things that many of us don’t think of: Things like connectivity, cost, and robustness are paramount in that environment, and that drives everything we do.

Endless is Hiring!

We can’t do this alone. We are looking for some great engineers to join our team. If this mission sounds great and you’re interested in working with us, let us know! We are looking for people who are passionate about bringing a great desktop to the rest of the world while developing some high-quality Free Software. We have a number of openings available:

  • Application Software Developer: Part of providing a great computer experience is to provide offline applications and content to users.
  • Cloud / Distributed Systems Architect: Help build the service that powers our offline content.
  • Kernel Engineer: We want to run on as many different types of cheap devices as possible. This job will help bring us to laptops, desktops, and all sorts of crazy ARM devices.
  • Internal Tooling Developer: We need someone to help maintain and build our internal build tools and create some new ones.
  • Software Engineer: Don’t see the job you’re looking for? We’re always looking for fantastic engineers of all types!

Feel free to mail me or ping me on IRC if you have any questions!

Changes…

Today is my last day at Red Hat.

I’ve been here for almost fifteen years, and it’s been a heckuva ride. I’ve seen GNOME and the Linux desktop grow from from pretty minimal beginings to what it is today.

RHAD Labs logo
The beginning…

Looking back on it, I’m so proud of the work that the Red Hat desktop team has accomplished during this time. We absolutely moved the bar on what was possible and enabled so many things. So many technologies that are basic building blocks of the modern Linux desktop were incubated within this group. Many of the things that people take for granted didn’t start in a vacuum but started because someone stepped up to make it happen.  Just off the top of my head dbus, metacity, gtk2, aiglx, systemd, pulseaudio, pango, cairo, gconf, orbit, gio/gvfs, gnome-shell, hal, NetworkManager, evince, PolicyKit and so many more got their start here.  Along the way, we made lifelong friends and built communities around these projects, to the point where others have taken them far beyond their humble beginnings.  To me, that’s what makes Free Software so awesome, and the Free desktops in particular so special.

GNOME Love

I am looking forward to being a part of the GNOME community in the future as a civilian, though I won’t be fixing any more TreeView bugs. (-:

The team is now in Christian Schaller’s capable hands and the engineering group at Red Hat is stronger than it has ever been. I’m looking forward to watching from the sidelines to see what they do next!

GNOME 3

*tap* *tap*  Is this thing on?

I am GNOME

It’s been too long since I blogged, but this is a great reason to post. I am so proud of everyone who put this release together. Everyone worked so hard on everything, and the pride and artistry comes through in every corner of the desktop.  Kudos go to everyone involved; the engineers for their craftsmanship, the designers for their persistence and vision, the marketing team for telling such a great story, the web team for making a home we can be proud of, and everyone else who’s cared about the project and helped shape it along the way.

Having been around for every major GNOME release this is by far the smoothest dot-zero we have ever done. The commitment to excellence this time around was amazing and the enthusiasm has been infectious.  I am already excited to see what’s planned for 3.2.

Passages

  • meta: It has been a long time since I’ve written anything. Being a father has taken its toll on my free time, and I got out of the habit of writing. As has happened every time I have hit a dry spell in the past, I count on the same thing to get me started up again. I change software! This time to the WordPress instance at http://blogs.gnome.org/jrb. The old, elisp-based version I borrowed from Federico wasn’t working out for me anymore. We will see if this one does any better. I’m counting on gnome-blog to help keep it updated too. Many thanks to jdub for helping me get the old entries imported.

    I have tried to keep the visual style of the old page — namely that of a ChangeLog entry. Nevertheless, I have made concessions to the modern web. ChangeLog entries should probably do the same. (-:

  • birthdays (GNOME): GNOME is now 10! Amazing. It has definitely been a long and strange trip. Dave’s recollection of Project Bob is a good memory. I’ll add my own:

    The first time I met most of the people working on GNOME (at that time) was in Linux Expo in 1998. gnome-0.20 was just about to be released. This version featured a newly written Wanda the fish applet to play with. There was a demo machine there with someone showing off the coolest feature in in GNOME at that time, namely embeddable drawers. People were dragging them into the panel, and creating crazy shapes and figures. Naturally, it was buggy like crazy. Sopwith was sitting on the machine next to it and had logged in remotely, surreptitiously hacking on the panel, trying to fix the bugs people were hitting. When the panel (or an application) would crash, he would quickly restart them, making it seem more stable than it was.

    Looking back on it, we had know idea of what we were getting ourselves into. I am sure if we knew back then what we know now, there is no way anyone would have started writing a desktop. It sure was a lot of fun though!

  • life (Eleanor): Eleanor has grown! She is sixteen months old, and is now spending her days running around the house, terrorizing the dog. She gets into a lot of mischief, but is very, very sweet. Zana and I don’t see her changing day by day, but just this weekend we had to put another box of clothes into the attic that she had outgrown. Her hair length is stuck somewhere in the middle of her back. It gets longer as she gets taller, but never quite seems to grow.
    Eleanor and Uncle Ed
    Eleanor and Uncle Ed

Wed 15 Nov 2006

  • elections (board): I am not running for reelection this year. After being on the board for the past five years, I wanted to step down before people start clamoring for term limits.More seriously, I feel like I have finally accomplished most of what I wanted to get done as a board member (although it took four years longer than I had hoped). I was able to present a clear picture of the financial state of the Foundation at GUADEC this year, and many of the institutional issues we have faced have been resolved. The Foundation is in great shape and it should be fun to be on next year’s board. Interest in GNOME is expanding, and there are lots of opportunities for the project everywhere.Federico did an excellent writeup of what qualifications are important in a successful board member. I only have two minor quibbles with his post. The first is that we can definitely find the money to buy a phone card for board members. I would hate to have concerns about phone bills keep an otherwise excellent candidate off the board.The second quibble is about his “rock star” comment. I think he is implying that being on the Board requires a definite time commitment. If you don’t have the time, you won’t be a good board member. People who already are doing a lot for the project (and thus, have earned the coveted “rock star” label) tend to not have spare time. If you do can’t make the time for the board, don’t run. It’s just as simple as that. We need good people with time, energy, and especially passion to be on the board \u2014 don’t let your label get in the way of running!Besides, being on the board this upcoming year is the fastest way to “rock star” status. (-:
  • eleanor: Jesse has been posting baby pictures all week of his new baby. It’s time to post a gratuitous baby picture of my own:
    Eleanor and Java
    Eleanor hearing about Java moving to the GPL

Tue 14 Nov 2006

  • shipping: A few months back, we asked a partner of ours (who will remain nameless) for some test equipment. We wanted to make sure that Fedora worked well on that set of hardware and machines. They didn’t arrive for quite some time. Finally, last week, they arrived at the office.

    It turns out that the machines had been shipped to the wrong location. Someone had very helpfully packed it up and forwarded them to us. Unfortunately, it seems that they didn’t have any packing material at the office it was shipped from. So instead of shipping the machines with styrofoam, or even packing peanuts, they filled the box with leftover pens and harmonicas. Yes, harmonicas. About fifty of them. Keeping the computers safe. Fortunately, the machines were robust enough to survive the trip, but geez, I hope they don’t go out to customers like that…