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Dear puzzle fan,

PuzzlePicnic has just been updated! Well, that's nothing new: it happened before. But we decided that it might be a good idea to give our members and visitors some insight into what's happening behind the scenes, and for that purpose each new update will now be accompanied by a post on the forum describing what actually changed.

... which is not altogether too exciting for the current update, since this is mainly a bugfix update. So without further ado, here are the changes.

New Features

Clickable histograms
The bars in the puzzle histograms on our statistics pages are now links to the puzzles page, where the puzzles that were represented by the bar are shown. Also at the top of each statistics page, a bar representing all puzzles on that page has been added.

Messages to accepted puzzles
Judges can now directly post messages to the authors of puzzles that have already been accepted, or are stored in the silo.

Fixed Bugs

Difficulty stats
The lists of puzzles by difficulty on the statistics pages now show up correctly.

Sorting puzzle selections
Sorting on the puzzles page now works correctly, no matter what combination of selections is made.

Profile link
The username in the top right corner of the website for users who are logged in is now correctly capitalised, and always links to your profile.

Estimated difficulty
The estimated difficulty of puzzles that authors can see on the statistics page of their puzzles is no longer sometimes zero.

New genre dates
When a new genre is added to the site, existing puzzles in that genre that are not yet published no longer get dated to the current date.

We have just done another update. Again, most changes took place behind the scenes. The most important change is a new communication method, that hopefully solves many of the problems that several users experienced when checking their solutions for correctness. Here is the full list of visible changes.

Fixed Bugs

Warnings for unverified puzzles
Some puzzles incorrectly had a warning that they had not yet been verified. This has been corrected: now the warning is only shown if the puzzle really has not been verified.

Puzzle selections
The puzzle selections are now not only stored correctly when sorting, but also when going to the next page!

Images
Images attached to judge messages (for authors) now show the right content.

New communication mechanism
The applet now has two communication mechanisms instead of one. It is now possible to communicate (sometimes asynchronously) via Javascript. This hopefully solves the notorious Firefox-bug.

Cookie storing
The puzzle cookies are no longer overwritten by static applets (such as the ones on the page to edit your puzzles).

"Discuss this puzzle"-link
There has been a change in policy for the Puzzle Feedback forum. From now on, only members are allowed to open topics on this forum via the puzzle-page. Naturally, the link to an already open topic is available for all visitors.

Being unsatisfied with the current prints of the puzzles, the main focus of this update has been a redesign of the puzzle prints.

New Features

Our logo on the prints
Maarten redesigned the layout of the print page, which now has the PuzzlePicnic logo on top.

Multiple puzzles per page
In the new design, it is possible to put multiple puzzles in the same genre on one page. The BatchPrinter (e.g. the printing-applet on the puzzles page) now automatically assigns puzzles to pages. Up to four puzzles of the same genre are now printed on the same (face of a) page, unless the puzzles themselves are too large. This is sometimes the case with nonograms.

MyPuzzles page
The MyPuzzles page now uses paging within each section, so people with many puzzles won't have a very slow page anymore.

Inactive genres
Judges now have the right to create puzzles in inactive genres. Furthermore, there is a new possible genre state "in development" to indicate that a genre is not yet finalised. The genre portal and studio are changed accordingly.

About page
We now mention the forum as the place to ask questions, and we thank our judges.

Links
There is a new link to cut-the-knot.

Current page
The links in the lower right for puzzles, genres and users (e.g. puzzle | edit | remove | stats) are now shown as normal text for the current page, and only as links for other pages.

Fixed Bugs

Printing from design applet
There were some problems with scaling when printing from an applet in design mode, which have hopefully been resolved now.

Correct number of pages
The print dialog now shows the correct number of pages (instead of 1~9999 as it was before).

Ability to specify page format
The user can now specify the page format (e.g. A4 instead of letter) before printing.

Printing multiple puzzles
There was a bug with the new communication that caused puzzles not to show up when printing multiple puzzles.

Printing cogwheels
Cogwheels on prints now appear correct (no grey square over the wheels).

Thumbnail images
We now use a better scaling algorithm, so the stored images will look nice no matter what resolution image you feed to the server (as long as it's at least 80x80, of course). We also store the images as png instead of jpeg now.

As you probably already noticed from the layout of the front page, PuzzlePicnic has been updated again.

New Features

Redesign
The front page now features a two-column design, for better visibility of the news entries. The same is true for several other pages, such as the genres page, the news page, and the links page. Additionally, the puzzle page now has a more intuitive navigation system.

Fixed Bugs

Slow loading of puzzle page
The puzzle page (the most important page of the website) was starting to load very slow, especially for genres with many puzzles. This issue has been fixed.

"Solved" mark
On the puzzle page, the "solved" mark now appears immediately after solving a puzzle.

Spokes alignment
Some Spokes puzzles were shown with too much empty space around them. This does not happen anymore.

A new version of Puzzlepicnic has been released.

New Features

Redesign of puzzle page. The images in the bottom of the puzzle page indicate which puzzles the user has already solved. Navigating between puzzles in the same genre has been simplified further.

Fixed Bugs

Some users have reported problems starting the puzzle applet. Apparently, the puzzle applet would not load correctly unless a Java 6 plugin was used. Mac users seemed to be affected especially by this problem. This should be resolved now.