Hi Sudoku users, Sudoku is currently nearing the completion of a rewrite and redesign. There are still many rough edges to be polished, but this is on track to become Sudoku 3.14. Credit to GSoC students Christopher Baines for starting the work, and Parin Pochera for completing much of it. The new design is intended to be simpler and easier to use than the current version of Sudoku, and to achieve this we're not planning to re-implement a few features that were present in Sudoku 3.12. Your feedback is appreciated on the following significant changes: * Notes are now restricted to only numeric digits, and at most five digits per cell to avoid becoming too long. Holding digits seemed to be the most useful purpose of notes, and restricting notes to digits allows us to explore nicer ways for marking notes: currently we are using a popover with a number pad, and keep the digits sorted for you automatically. If you were doing something else with notes, please let us know. * We have only implemented top notes and not bottom notes. If you found bottom notes useful, please let us know how you were using them. * We have removed hints because we found they are unhelpful when the user gets stuck in a hard position, which is precisely when the feature needs to work best. I'm a little hesitant about this because hints currently work quite well if the user has missed an obvious move, so this might be temporary, but we weren't sure how to fix it. * We have removed the Show Possible Numbers option because it shows you exactly which moves to make, defeating the entire purpose of the game. (It still exists to ease debugging, hidden behind a command line switch.) * Instead of the super colorful highlighter, we're planning to lightly shade the current row/column. * We currently have not reimplemented trackers and we haven't yet decided what to do about them. We're quite certain that a new implementation needs to be significantly simpler than what is in 3.12: possibly just allowing you to snapshot one or more points in the game, and changing the color of your numbers between snapshots. Suggestions from people who use trackers are particularly appreciated. Please respond if you have concerns about any of these changes. Thanks! Michael
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