Wordtwist.org Version 2.1 Board Released

This morning we released the latest and greatest version (2.1) of the new, Flash-based Wordtwist playing board.  Thanks to everyone who’s been providing feedback on the new board!  We’re doing our best to incorporate most, if not all, of your suggestions into the code.  For those who aren’t familiar with the new playing board, here’s a quick overview:

New features include:

Mouse-over functionality – players can now use a click-and-mouseover method to submit words.  Simply click on the first letter of the word you want to submit, then (without holding down the mouse-button) just mouseover each subsequent letter, in order, until you reach the final letter in the word.  Click once more on the last letter, and the word will automatically be submited.  Letters that have been selected will appear as a bright orange color, while letters that are available to be used next (i.e. those that are contiguous to the last letter and which have not yet been used) will be highlighted in light orange.

Board rotation – by popular demand, players can now rotate the board 90 degrees simply by clicking the new “rotate” button.   Not all players will use this feature, but for some the rotation feature helps them to visually pick out word patterns which might otherwise not be noticed.

Improved timer handling – the timer in this version is vastly improved over our previous board.  Players should no longer run into problems where the timer doesn’t start, doesn’t finish, runs too fast or too slow, or stops mid-way through a game.

Audible DING! at time’s up – also by popular demand, a simple bell DING! sound will play when the timer reaches zero.

Those are the main improvements in the Flash board vs. the original game board.  Version 2.1 contains several bug-fixes discovered by our players in Version 2.0 – we’ve fixed the “focus” problem so that the cursor should always remain in the text box, and we’ve vastly improved the frame-rate so that our faster typists should find that the application keeps up with your typing.  We still have a few issues being reported which we’re still working on:

- Some users are complaining that using the back button doesn’t erase letters but rather forces their browser to go back a page.  We’re looking into this.

- Some users are saying the new board is harder on the eyes than our old board.  We’re still not entirely sure why this is, as we’ve tried to keep the design as close as possible to the original, but if you’re finding that the new board gives you eye strain or other problems, PLEASE send in your feedback and be as specific as possible when describing the precise problem.

If you have any other feedback or comments on the new board, please feel free to post them here.

Thanks as always for playing!

- Stephen