Sudoku Susser 2.5.1 review

Sudoku Susser is a free program that helps you play Sudoku

License: Freeware File size: 5908K Developer: Robert Woodhead

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Sudoku Susser is a free program that helps you play Sudoku. If you've been living under a rock and don't know what a Sudoku puzzle is, the London Daily Mail has a good introduction to the puzzles and basic solving techniques.

Sudoku Susser project makes it easy to make your selections as you solve the puzzle; just click on one of them and select the new number from the popup menu that appears, or mouse over it and press the number on the keyboard. But it does far more than that!

If you make a mistake and enter an invalid move, the Susser will hilight the invalid squares in red. If you'd like some extra help keeping track of what's what, checking Show Hints will display all the remaining possibilities in the corner of empty squares, and hilight empty squares that can only be a single value in green.

If you want help with a puzzle, the Deduce! button will apply 10 increasingly sophisticated techniques in order to progress. Sudoku Susser can solve all know sudokus by logic, using only techniques that human players would reasonably be able to execute (though a couple are ones that only a Sudoku maniac would try to use). Each step in the solving process is explained in detail. You can single-step, and you can brute-force recurse to get the solution.

With the addition of the “Trebor's Tables” deduction algorithm, the Susser can now logically deduce the solution to the most difficult known Sudoku puzzles.

Here are some key features of "Sudoku Susser":
You can drag Sudoku graphics from just about any webpage and they'll be scanned and loaded into the application.
Instant download of new puzzles from the Menneske.no Sudoku archive.
Extensive help and hinting features show you the logical structures in the puzzles.
You can manage, rename, reorder, and print out your Sudokus.
You can drag them out of the app as graphics or in a variety of text formats.
Undo and redo are fully supported.

Requirements:
GTK+ 2.0 (or higher)
glibc-2.3 (or higher)
CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System)

What's New in This Release:
Major Changes

Linux version no longer crashes on launch!
You can now independently set the colors of the "non-buddy" and the invalid squares, as well as the color of the bars of the hieroglyph.
The popup hieroglyph now uses the initial square (yellow), invalid square (red) and possibility digit (green) colors, so if you change them, the glyph changes too; this may be particularly useful if you are colorblind.
When hilighting possibilities, holding down the CONTROL key will change the row/column labels to display the # of unsolved squares in the corresponding column that contain the hinted possibility.
By popular demand (and several unpopular threats!), added extra space between blocks to make them more distinct.
Changed "mark" nomenclature to "bookmark" and added bookmark icon to the interface.

Bug Fixes

Option-g, Option-Shift-g, Option-d and Option-Shift-d keyboard shortcuts now work properly
Repeat last fetch works properly, and is also now in the File menu so you can cmd-F it. It is only activated when you do a non-"daily sudoku" type of fetch, since repeating the fetch of a daily sudoku is silly.
Removed an errant "debug beep" that occurs when you change colors
Fixed very minor bug in line connector layouts, making them visually just a tiny bit nicer. Not that anyone will notice, since this bug had been in the app for about 6 months!
Line connectors made fatter, and given a surrounding edge.
Clue for hidden pairs was a bit obscure; clarified.
Pink Possibility and Possibility Filter popup options were implying that ESC would cancel them; not so! Popups changed to reflect this.
On Windows, the Susser would get really confused when you tried to quit it from a minimized state, and wouldn't show the window properly when it restarted. It is now less confused.
On Mac, the Susser no longer chews up 15% of your CPU when it's minimized into the Dock.
The square image cache was greedily snagging all system resources on some Win98/ME machines. It now defaults to disabled and there is a preference to turn it on and test it.
When editing a board color, if the saturation and intensity are both 0, saturation is set to maximum, which doesn't change the color but does make the slider display a bit more intuitive.
Under Linux, the shortcuts pane gets its textsize from the font menu setting; it does not autoresize to fit (as it does under Windows/Mac)