Puzzling

My marketing and promotions department (me) told me that I should do a little plug for our CrypticGuide app . Plug plug plug ... This is an app that took us over a year to develop — my husband had to do vast amounts of tricky iOS database programming, and I had to write the vast database of info! So, what is  it? It's a handy little cryptic dictionary — so you can enter a word from a cryptic clue, and if it's in our database, CrypticGuide can tell you that there's an abbreviation arising from that word, or maybe it's an anagram indicator, or has some funny cryptic meaning, or is a homophone. So, in the example here (which shows the iPad version), if you type in the word 'about', you'll see that the word 'about', found in a cryptic clue, could lead to a few cryptic synonyms (circa, on, a fight), a range of abbreviations (A, C, CA, RE), and a bunch of cryptic indicators (anagram indicator, container indicator etc). Unlike other cryptic...

I'm very excited to announce that my first app is up for sale on the iTunes App Store! My husband Ralph and I have been working on this for ages — he is the expert code monkey, and I've done the graphics and written all the crosswords. My Quick Break crosswords have appeared for years in The Cairns Post.  They are 13 x 13 quick crosswords (not cryptic), and mostly quite easy to solve, with the occasional tricky word. I am no longer doing syndicated puzzles for newspapers (a rapidly dying field), so apps are the way forward. This first volume contains 50 of my Quick Break crosswords. Volumes 2, 3 and 4 are in production. Here are some screen shots to entice you!  Just tap on the grid to bring up the keyboard, then start typing in your answers: You can choose from four fonts and nine background papers, including dark papers and crumpled paper with coffee stains! And you can choose the colours for everything - the grid, the text, and the highligh...