Over on CrossCord, user NoahF had a fantastic idea for crossword construction: what if there were a Tinder-like interface for editing entries in your wordlist? An interface shows you a random word for your list and you edit its score by swiping, tapping, etc. User JayLow came up with the “Griddr” name for such a thing, and the idea sparked lots of interest and discussion.
Well, we’re never ones to let a good idea go by, so we built a very bare-bones version of such a thing, which you can check out in action here. Here’s what happens:
- You load your word list, which must be a text file where each line is of the form WORD;SCORE. Note that the word list is not uploaded to our servers, so your list is safe from prying eyes.
- The interface will show you 100 random entries from your list in a stack.
- You can swipe right on an entry to set its score to 80, or swipe left to set its score to 45.
- You can save your list at any time by clicking the button.
We’re excited about this and the interface is pretty slick, but as is, this is basically unusable. There’s no option to keep the score as is, there’s no possibility of customizing what you see or what the scores will be when you swipe. So … why are we releasing something clearly unfinished? Well, it’s because we want your help improving it! The code is available on our GitHub and released under the MIT license. If you know any CSS or JavaScript and have ideas for improvements, please feel free to make a fork and a PR! We think this is a really cool idea and with a little input from the community, we can make a tool everyone can use.