This week’s App Smart column was all about apps that transform the traditional crossword puzzle experience into a touchscreen-friendly, socially-networked, answer-hinting experience on your smartphone or tablet.
But if you do still appreciate the joys of scribbling on a real printed newspaper, swapping between pencil and pen as you close in on the answer to word clues then there are crossword “assistant” apps that can add a little technological boost to your puzzling without taking it totally digital.
Some simply leverage word-matching tech to suggest likely clue answers based on word-lengths and the letters you’ve found already. Crossword Solver, free on Android and Crossword Solver Free on iTunes do this, searching among thousands upon thousands of words for ones that could possibly match, and even suggesting anagrams in the former app’s case. As a tool to help you, they absolutely work because you have to at least have guessed a few letters of the clue yourself. But they lack finesse and they’re mechanical and soulless. That may be the very opposite of the creative work of solving a word puzzle.
If you’d prefer a more gentle crossword solver, you may love Agent X Word which is free on iOS. It’s got a slickly graphical interface that plays on a cartoon spy meme, and it actually asks you to type in the clue that you’re stuck on. For example, typing in “long thick hair” and tapping on the hint button led to the app saying it was “60% sure” the first letter was “M”– tallying nicely with the actual answer “mane.” If you tap on “gimme the answer” it gives you a similar short list of guesses, with a confidence probability assigned to them.
Perhaps the most pleasant aspect of all of these apps is that the art of playing crosswords isn’t being bumped off by digital media — it’s being augmented by it.
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