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Showing posts from February, 2012

Wordplay Wizard

I thought you might be interested in seeing some of the specialist software that helps me to write my cryptic crosswords. The latest tool in my arsenal is Wordplay Wizard , the creation of "Crossword Man", British-born Ross Beresford. He has several other programs for writing crosswords, but as I have custom crossword software written by my husband, all I need is this little one. This is PC only software, so I especially got Parallels Desktop 7 and Windows 7 for my Mac, and Wordplay Wizard runs beautifully in a separate window on my Mac desktop. So, what does Wordplay Wizard do? Well, it is rather awesome (I get excited by it, anyway!) ... you type in a word, any word (in fact, any collection of letters), and it will bring up all the possible arrangements and ways of clueing that word with a cryptic device! When you have to write as many cryptic crosswords as I do at the moment (1-2 full crosswords per day, which is about 30-70 clues!), you can see that this is an a