GNOME is Sponsoring an Outreachy Internship Project for GNOME Crosswords!

We are excited to announce that the GNOME Foundation is sponsoring an Outreachy internship project for the June 2025 to August 2025 internship round!

Outreachy provides internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living.

The intern will work with mentors Jonathan Blandford, Federico Mena Quintero, and Tanmay Patil on the project Add Wordlist Scoring to the GNOME Crosswords Editor.

The intern’s blog will soon be added to Planet GNOME, where you can follow their project updates and learn more about them. Stay tuned!

feborg.es/gnome-outreachy-june…

Add Wordlist Scoring to GNOME Crosswords Editor (#63) · Issues · Teams / Internship / Project Ideas · GitLab

Add Wordlist Scoring to GNOME Crosswords Editor Mentors jrb@gnome.org

^GitLab

A recent discussion on social media about the fact that I enjoy doing #Tactile (#Braille) #puzzles on #paper prompted a thought about producing them to share more widely. #Crosswords, #wordsearches, #Sudoku and so forth.

If anyone is interested, please feel free to fill and share my expression of interest form below.

is.gd/brl5qs

Rustifying libipuz: character sets - viruta.org/rustifying-libipuz-…

Rustificar libipuz: conjuntos de caracteres - viruta.org/rustifying-libipuz-…

#crosswords #rust

I made a new #GNOME #Crosswords release. This release is light on end-user visible changes, but is good preparation for the next stage. It finalizes the basic visual design, and the underlying stateless architecture will make it a lot easier to extend.

To test the design, I did some initial panes. For creating the grid I added some statistics and histograms. For authoring clues I added anagrams, and odd and even words.

Full update is here: blogs.gnome.org/jrb/2024/01/05…

A quick #GNOME #Crosswords Editor development update. I added better selection for grids, and used it to add a feature I've wanted for a while: clue fragment highlighting.

Demonstration video: youtu.be/LXLNpxnDvBg

GNOME Crossword Editor: Selections showing anagrams

Work-in-progress video of selections and anagrams working together. Selecting a section of the clue text will show anagrams of those letters, as an assist fo...

^YouTube

After a month of changes to libipuz, I finally got the new editing interface working. These changes make it possible to differentiate between broken puzzles and correct-but-unhelpful puzzles, with an API to fix the latter. As a result, I extended the #GNOME #Crosswords Editor to edit barred puzzles.

Note: barred puzzles are basically impossible to set, and I'm in awe of anyone who is able to make a grid work. Maybe someone can make a cool puzzle with this.

Demo video below:

I released a new version of Crosswords this weekend. It was a big one. You can read the details here: blogs.gnome.org/jrb/2023/01/23…

#GNOME #crosswords

One reason I worked on these docs is that I'd like to attempt a virtual hackfest this weekend. It would be fun to get together and add some functionality to the game. If you’re interested at all in word games and free software and would like to attend, let me know! Even if its just to work on a crossword, all are welcome.

[ Also, if you've had success running a virtual hackfest also let me know. I'd love to hear about practical tips for running one of these. ]

#gnome #Crosswords

Pretty chuffed that my #cryptic #crosswords have been bundled into #GNOME Crosswords [1], the crossword playing software of choice for #Linux!

Some of my puzzles ship with the software itself, so if you're a crossword lover on Linux, do give it a spin! ✏️ 🧩

[1] lwn.net/Articles/903475/