Category Archives: iOS

Stealing wins at Letterpress

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[Yes, this is another in my continuing series of articles about the game of Letterpress. For those of you who do not play this game, feel free to move on.]

Occasionally, winning a Letterpress game requires taking a step back and rethinking your entire approach. Such was the case with a recent game of mine. Had I stuck with my typical strategies, I would have lost the game. Luckily, I became aware of the danger before it was too late. As a result, I managed to “steal” a victory—in just two moves!

Position after opening move of REMARKING

My opponent opened with the word REMARKING. Before reading further, take a moment and decide on what word you would play next.

My initial take was that I was in considerable trouble. My opponent had already protected squares in two corners—not a good sign. Worse, if I wasn’t careful, I could easily imagine him expanding to a third corner on his next turn. Alternatively, he could significantly expand his two corners at the top of the board. Either way, the game would likely be effectively over. He would be helped by the fact that the board overflowed with easy-to-find long words, such as LOVEMAKING or MISCARRIAGES or PARLIAMENTS.

I figured that, to have any chance at all, I’d have to secure both the two lower corners on my first word. Further, it would be almost as critical to simultaneously attack my opponent’s position at the top of the board. Doing all of this at once would require a fairly long word—likely 11 letters or more.

While I had no trouble coming up with 11+ letter words, none of then hit the right combination of squares. For example, OPERATIONALISM omitted the essential V, needed to grab the southwest corner. Similarly, a 15 letter word(!), IMPROVISATIONAL, amazingly did not contain an E, needed to protect the southeast corner.

Then the nickel dropped. I was looking at this game completely wrong. I was actually in much more trouble than I had realized. Paradoxically, I was also in much better shape than I had thought.

The bad news was that, even if IMPROVISATIONAL contained an E (imagine that it was spelled EMPROVISATIONAL), I couldn’t afford to play it. It would leave CMPRR as the only remaining unclaimed letters. My opponent could then play any number of possible word, such as CRIMPERS or PROCLAIMER or PARAMETRIC, and immediately win the game! Uh-oh! The same unhappy logic applied to all other super-long words I might play.

But wait! There was actually an up side to this situation. I didn’t have to play a super-long word. I didn’t even have to take both lower corners. In fact, it would be better if I didn’t. Instead, I could play a word like CARMAKERS — which is what I did.

Position after I played CARMAKERS

This word secured the southeast corner, protecting three squares. More importantly, it left 11 unclaimed squares. I couldn’t be 100% certain, but I was almost sure that there was no one word that used all of these remaining letters. Even if there were, I figured it was unlikely my opponent would find it. In fact, unless he understood the situation as I now did, he probably wouldn’t even be looking for it.

For example, if my opponent came back with IMPROVISATIONAL, it would still leave one P unclaimed. That would almost certainly be sufficient for me to find a word that contained that P and enough other unprotected squares to give me a win on my next turn. Actually, my position was even better. If my opponent played any word that contained a P, other than IMPROVISATIONAL,  I could play IMPROVISATIONAL and immediately win.

My opponent came back with PARKINGS. Yes! He had taken the bait and played a word with a P in it, leaving 9 unclaimed letters. He was probably feeling pretty good about his position at this point, unaware of what was about to happen.

Position after my opponent played PARKINGS

I play IMPROVISATIONAL and win the game 17-8

I played IMPROVISATIONAL and “stole a win” with a score of  17-8 — ending the game with just two moves.

One final question to ponder: What should my opponent have played instead of PARKINGS?

I’m not sure. Without the help of a complete list of all possible words (that would be cheating!), he would have to be concerned that any word that took even one unclaimed square might allow me to win the game on my next turn (as, in fact, I did). Given that, it might be best for him to play a word that took no new unclaimed squares. The main exception would be if he could find a word that left him with 13 or more protected squares, blocking any chance of me winning on my next turn.

Of course, if he did play a defensive word, leaving 11 unclaimed squares, I would find myself in almost the identical dilemma. That is, both of us would likely have to play to avoid the 11 squares—and continue to do so as long as it remained a viable option. Eventually, one of us would stumble and lose. What a strange situation. But that’s what makes Letterpress such a great game.

To see a replay of the entire game, click here.

Another “stolen” victory

In this next game, I deliberately gave my opponent a winning position—with the hope that he would not see it. When things went as I had hoped, I was able to surprise my opponent and “steal” the victory on my next turn.

The game was hard-fought over the first eight moves. However, playing second, I was definitely on the losing end of the battle. After my opponent played MOLTEN on move 9, I was unable to see any clear path to victory.

The position after my opponent played MOLTEN

The gist of the situation was that both of us were avoiding the 5 unclaimed squares (XTKLL) for the typical reason: there was no one word that used all 5 letters and the fear was that claiming any one of the 5 letters could allow the opponent to take the remaining 4 and win. For example, if either of us had taken the K, the other player could play EXTOLLING and win. As I recall (my memory’s a bit hazy here), it probably would have been safe to take the T in the southwest corner; however, this would have required a word with two T’s, as neither of us wanted to leave the upper T in the opponent’s hands. There weren’t many words with two T’s that also included the other required squares. ALLOTMENT was a possibility (my opponent might have played it instead of MOLTEN). As for me, I valued the R more than the second T. So the T was left alone.

As such, we were left to skirmish over the claimed but unprotected squares (LMRNTO), exchanging possession of most or all of them with each turn.

If we continued to maintain this see-saw exchange, it’s possible I would have wound up with a final advantage. But it seemed unlikely. With the advantage of having gone first, my opponent was always just a bit ahead. So, out of a sense of “desperation,” I decided to attempt a swindle and go for a quick win. I played EXCLAMATION, taking the X of the unclaimed squares.

The position after I played EXCLAMATION

If my opponent could now find and play a word that used KLLT, he was almost certain to win the game. Actually, I already knew there was at least one such word: CLOTHLIKE. This word would win the game for my opponent. My hope here was that my opponent would not discover this word and (incorrectly) assume he instead needed to continue the see-saw. It seemed worth a shot in a game that I was otherwise likely to lose anyway.

I got my wish. My opponent played EXAMINATOR. It was a great word, reclaiming the MNTO squares as well as taking the newly claimed X. Had I continued the see-saw, I didn’t know of any word that I could use to take back MNTOX. Most likely, I would have had to leave my opponent with the X and an increased advantage. I’m sure that’s what my opponent was expecting to happen.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to do that. Instead, I played CLOTHLIKE and stole the victory by the thinnest of margins, 13-12.

To see a replay of the entire game, click here.

Letterpress “house rules”

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Recently, Jim Biancolo alerted me to an article he posted regarding informal “house rules” for playing Letterpress. The article linked to two other similar postings by other players (Brent Simmons and Daniel Jalkut). As a fan of this great game (I’ve previously written two articles on Letterpress strategy), I want to offer my thoughts regarding these “rules.”

First off, I completely agree with two of the rules cited by the above players:

• If you win a game, let your opponent go first on a rematch. That is, allow the loser the advantage of the first move on the next game. Usually, this happens automatically in games I play, as the loser challenges the winner for a rematch.

• Don’t use any “cheater” apps or websites while playing a game. This should be obvious. There’s a reason they call these programs “cheats.” And that’s the reason you should stay away from them. After the game is over, it’s okay to look at them to potentially learn words you might have otherwise played. But not during the game.

There is one minor exception to this for me. I am still waiting for Loren to update Letterpress (as he previously informed me he was planning to do) so that you can check the validity of a word when it is your turn. As it now stands, you can only do this when it is your opponent’s turn. If you enter a valid word when it’s your turn, it plays…period.

There are many times when I want to know if a word is valid without necessarily playing it. In fact, there are times when I have no intention of ever playing a given word. I instead want to know if I need to worry about my opponent playing it. So, in such cases, I look up the word. I don’t consider this cheating.

As to the rest of the suggested rules, I generally do not agree with them. In particular:

• I wouldn’t end a game in a tie after 50 moves. Rather, I plow on until someone wins or resigns.

• I don’t consider it off-limits to play a word like STOPPED if my opponent plays a similar word of the same length, like STOPPER. I especially wouldn’t consider abiding by this when I have no idea if my opponent is doing so, as is usually the case.

Similarly, I make no effort to avoid playing a word with a prefix or suffix added to my opponent’s word. I do check to see if there is a better word I could play instead. But if I can’t find one, I would have no hesitation about playing REACTIONS, for example, after my opponent played REACTION.

More than that, I believe this is a positive part of the strategy of the game. For example, I might see that the words STOPPER, STOPPERED, STOPPERS, STOPPED and STOPS are all available. Before I would play any of those words, I try to think through the implications of my opponent playing the other words in response. Figuring out how best to play the sequence takes skill. Perhaps the best strategy will be not to play any of the words until your opponent plays one first.

Such sequences sometimes lead me to try unusual approaches. For example, there are situations where I might play ADVISE even though I know ADVISES is playable. The reason is that I see that ADVISED is also available. By playing ADVISE, if my opponent replies with ADVISES, I can come back with ADVISED. If I played ADVISES first, and my opponent played ADVISED, I would have no come back.

• Finally, I don’t try to win with the smallest possible advantage. To the contrary, I go for the largest margin of victory I can get. Once again, I view knowing how to maximize your win as part of the skill of the game. However, I do have a limit. The limit is I will not unduly prolong a game simply to up the score differential. Once it’s clear that I have the game won, I try to expedite the ending. However, if I see a game ending in about the same number of moves, and I wind up with a bigger score by using word A rather than word B, I will take word A every time.

One rule I would add to the list:

• If you give up on a game, resign. Don’t just abandon the game and leave your opponent dangling, unsure if you ever intend to play again.

Smaller is the new larger

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Back in the old days (of less than a decade ago), for any device that had a screen, users most lusted for the largest size they could get. Cost and space considerations might prohibit such a purchase, but “bigger is better” remained the mantra.

Old: Bigger is better

Interested in buying a laptop? It was the 17-inch model that turned the most heads. Deciding on a new iMac? If you had the dough, you got the one with the largest display.

Over the years, Apple’s Cinema/Thunderbolt Displays have increased in size from 22” to 27”. You can’t buy a smaller one today even if you wanted to do so.

Getting a new flat-panel television? The preferred choice has been the largest one that fits within your room and your budget.

New: Smaller is better

In the last few years, however, the apple of a tech user’s eye has often taken a U-turn.

Apple has eliminated any 17-inch laptop from its lineup. Even the 15-inch MacBook Pro seems to be falling out of favor, as the 13-inch size emerges as the new standard. For the MacBook Air, many reviewers cite the 11-inch model as preferable to the 13-inch. A similar situation exists with the iPad Air vs. iPad mini, with a majority of reviews (at least among the ones that I’ve read) leaning towards a preference for the mini.

That’s right…even techno-savvy “power users” that write reviews, and for whom price is usually not a prime consideration, often say they want the smallest model they can get. What a turn-around!

Apple’s new Mac Pro is being lauded for its small size, compared to the old Mac Pro behemoth…even though the size reduction comes at the expense of internal expandability.

Among flat-panel TVs, larger sizes still rule. But even here, I’ve noticed a trend towards downsizing from a few years ago. Buyers now seem more averse to getting a television that overpowers their room — unless they are setting up the room as a dedicated home theater. Users also seem increasingly content to watch movies on their iPads, skipping the larger television entirely.

What’s going on?

What exactly is going on here? What’s behind this seismic shift, with smaller now the new larger?

To some extent, it’s been developing for quite some time. Sales of laptops have long ago eclipsed desktop machines, despite a laptop’s much smaller display. In fact, many analysts predict that consumer desktop computers will disappear from the landscape altogether in the not-too-distant future. For most, the convenience of being able to move around with the computer outweighs all other considerations.

However, I trace the origins of the more recent surge to the arrival of the iPhone. The iPhone was the first device to offer most of the functionality of a laptop computer, but with a size that could fit in your pocket. Suddenly, mobility and portability were the buzz words of the day.

With the advent of the iPad, even laptops are now viewed as heavy and clunky in comparison. Tablets are well on their way to replacing laptops as the primary computing device of the masses.

Helping to fuel this transition are improvements in display quality. In the past, buying a small-sized device often required accepting a trade-off of an impractically tiny display. But with today’s higher resolution screens, including Apple’s Retina display, a small display can show an incredible amount of real estate and still have legible text.

The result is that smaller is not only more acceptable these days, but preferred — especially for those who place a high value on mobility. Such users increasingly extol the advantages of smaller. They complain that you can’t use a full-sized iPad with one hand or that a 15-inch laptop is too big to use within the confines of an airline seat. Smaller sizes are deemed more convenient for any sort of travel.

There remains one major exception to this shift: smartphones. Although Apple has so far largely resisted the trend, Android users have shown a preference for the largest phone that can fit in their pocket (or, in some cases, one too large to fit). There are now 6-inch Android smartphones! Perhaps conceding to this trend, there are rumors that Apple will release a larger iPhone later this year.

Of course, even a 6-inch phone is still quite small — compared to a tablet, a laptop or a desktop computer.

Overall, I view the shift towards “smaller is better” as part of a larger technological and cultural shift away from viewing computers as a “destination” (something you go to an office to sit down and use) towards becoming a transparent and ever-present part of our lives. I suppose the inevitable end-point will be when computers are implanted in our brains and have no external size at all. Not to worry. That’s still at least a few years away.

What’s going on with iWork?

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In the unlikely event that you haven’t yet heard, let me be the one to break the news to you: the new iWork ’13 apps for OS X have been “dumbed down.” At least that’s the prevailing view. Distressed at the loss of numerous significant features from the previous iWork ’09 versions, including vanishing AppleScript support, many users have lamented that the new apps amount to “an unmitigated disaster.”

At the same time, other users have just as strongly cautioned against over-reacting to these changes. For example, in his Macworld review of Keynote 6.0, Joe Kissell wrote:

 “Despite the missing features, it would be unfair to characterize Keynote 6 as being ‘dumbed down.’ Indeed, Apple has added splendid capabilities that make Keynote smarter in several respects.”

Matthew Panzarino, writing on TechCrunch, offered a similar reaction:

“Lots of folks are getting all worked up about iWork being ‘dumbed down,’ but it feels like a reset to me.”

These more benign interpretations emphasize that the new iWork ’13 apps are not really upgrades from the previous versions. Rather, they are entirely redesigned-from-the-ground-up new programs. Having to make this sort of drastic revision, especially within the inevitable time and resource constraints, almost guarantees that some features will get dropped along the way.

So why did Apple make such drastic changes? The obvious and conventional wisdom answer is that Apple wanted to bring parity and cross-platform compatibility to the OS X and iOS versions of the iWork apps. Doing this required a rewrite of the software. In this goal, almost everyone agrees that Apple succeeded. You can seamlessly move among the apps on each platform without skipping a beat. As Jeffery Battersby put it in his review of Pages for iOS:

“There is now no noticeable difference between all of Apple’s Pages apps.”

Or, as Nigel Warren explained:

 “The fact that iWork on the Mac has lost functionality isn’t because Apple is blind to power users. It’s because they’re willing to make a short-term sacrifice in functionality so that they can create a foundation that is equal across the Mac, iOS, and web versions.”

Given the tortured history of cross-platform file syncing among iWork documents, this is great news. As for the lost features, the optimists expect them to return over time. There is certainly precedent for this expectation, most notably with Final Cut Pro X. Similarly, just last week, after the release of a new version of iMovie met with the same sorts of criticism, Apple promised that it will at least return the ability to import movie projects between iOS and Macs. Even better, Apple just announced that it intends to “reintroduce some of the [missing iWork] features in the next few releases.” [Update: See this Apple support article for more details.]

Still, there is a big question that remains: How far will this recovery go? Can we really expect that all or almost all of the MIA features will be restored? My answer is: No.

Given the admirable intent to maintain seamless cross-platform compatibility, Apple cannot restore features to the OS X versions of iWork apps unless those features can be matched on iOS devices, especially if the inconsistency would break the ability of a file to look and act the same on both platforms. Given the inherent limitations of iOS compared to OS X, including the more severe restrictions of sandboxing in iOS, this means that certain iWork ’09 features will be lost for a long long time. Perhaps forever.

As one example, I believe AppleScript falls into this category. There is no AppleScript in iOS, and I don’t expect this to change. As such, I doubt will we ever see any significant restoration of AppleScript in the OS X iWork apps. [Update: Despite Apple’s promise to “make improvements to AppleScript support” in future versions Keynote and Numbers, I don’t expect this to amount to much.] This doesn’t mean that Apple intends to entirely drop AppleScript from OS X. But it does mean a lessening of support for it going forward. There’s a chance that Apple might introduce some entirely new method of automation, one that works on both Macs and iOS devices. But I wouldn’t assign a high probability to this.

Apple’s actions here should not be a big surprise. They continue a trend that has been developing and growing over the past several years. Apple’s mobile devices have eclipsed Macs as the company’s primary source of revenue and profit. The result is that the evolution of OS X and OS X apps is driven by how well they integrate with iPhones and iPads.

Apple isn’t abandoning its power users. At least not yet. There’s a new Mac Pro coming (although it has already caused some grumbling due to its lack of internal expandability) and Apple continues to support apps such as Final Cut Pro. But these make up a shrinking portion of Apple’s revenue. And they live in an environment separate from concerns about iOS compatibility. There’s no iOS equivalent of Final Cut Pro.

The consumer market is Apple’s future, its “bread-and-butter.” Many analysts have predicted that, over the next several years, desktop machines — and perhaps even laptops— will all but vanish as users increasingly adopt tablets as their only computing device. To the extent that this happens, for any consumer Mac software that survives, compatibility with iOS devices will far outweigh any consideration about what “pro” features may be missing. Marco Tabini makes a similar point in a recent Macworld article:

 “…it’s also possible that Apple is ‘dumbing down’ its apps because the company believes that the kind of comprehensive software to which we have become accustomed will no longer belong in the personal computing landscape of the future.”

I agree. For the vast majority of users, what we used to do with apps such as iWork (and Microsoft Office, for that matter) will become an increasingly distant and irrelevant memory. What we expect from computing devices and how we interact them is undergoing a dramatic shift. Inexpensive, more focused, simple-to-use software is the currency of the day. The new iWork apps are not an aberration. Despite what concessions Apple may make going forward, Apple has no intention of reversing directions. Whether you call it “dumbing down” or “iOS-ification,” whether you view it as an overall positive or negative shift, this is where things are headed. Get on board, get out of the way, or get run over.