Anchor pieces

July 2, 2013

Did you notice the option "Anchor pieces"? It’s in the usual place, in General Options, accessible pressing the key F3:


With this option active when you drop a piece in its proper place in the Solution frame, the piece is "anchored” in place so you can not move it inadvertently (if you want to move it anyway, you have to double click that piece). If we want to compare that feature to a real puzzle it would be kind of a puzzle with magnetic pieces each attracted to its right place when it is left there.


Additionally when you have Anchored active, when you request a Hint on a piece, the program will tell the location of that piece (instead of the adjacent piece if you are in non-anchored mode).

And, by the way, an undocumented trick in the program: When you click an anchored piece the program displays a message warning it is anchored. That message has an option to “Not show this anymore” so it won’t display that warning again. This type of warnings can be re-enabled: The trick is holding down the key Shift in the keyboard while you do the action that would provoke the warning message. Not the most useful feature but it's there so you may like to know it :-) (We programmed it for testing during development and left it there as it doesn’t hurt and a principle in software design is allowing to undo anything the user does).

Back to the Anchored pieces, that’s a feature not found on the traditional cardboard puzzles, but we are here to make things easier keeping the experience of doing jigsaw puzzles. Do you like having the pieces stick to the background?


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