This is the thing that might make me give up on the app. Defeats the object of being on an app if I need a pen and paper to fiddle with anagrams. This is the big one and would help improve the experience to match the website. ✓ Mostly good, lacks features Enjoying having puzzles in an app rather than needing to wade through the website - easier to have a quick break. Switching to landscape mode shows a smaller part of the puzzle, the keyboard, and multiple clues on the right side-you can scroll through the clues and tap on one to move the input to that clue in the puzzle.Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords for Negative User Reviews If you tap on the Clues button, you get a list of all the clues with the squares for each clue as well as any letters you’ve filled in-a great touch, although it would be nice if you could tap to bring up a keyboard and enter letters in that view as well. (If you find the keyboard too small, you can enable the Large Keyboard option in the app’s settings-and you can swipe your finger vertically across the keyboard to hide it if you want to see more of the puzzle.) In portrait mode, you see the puzzle, keyboard, and the clue for the selected word. It also doesn’t offer a landscape mode for solving puzzles.Ĭrosswords, on the other hand, has a keyboard embedded as part of its interface-although it’s not the standard iPhone keyboard-that comes in two sizes. That makes it hard to see longer answers, unless you pinch to zoom out (a setting the app doesn’t remember once you exit from the puzzle) and make the whole puzzle very small. When you double-tap on a square to bring up the keyboard (the way you enter letters), it takes up so much room that you can’t see very much of the puzzle. On the negative side, 2 Across doesn’t show its keyboard in any of its normal modes. Keyboard Coverage: Summon the keyboard to enter letters in 2 Across, and it covers much of the puzzle you’re trying to solve.Ģ Across also lets you use gestures for the clue bar: swipe right to go to the next clue or next incomplete clue swipe left to to the previous clue or previous incomplete clue tap to switch directions, go to the first square of a clue, or go the first empty square of a clue and double tap to switch directions, go to the first square of a clue, or the first empty square of a clue.
Its Grid view shows you the puzzle with the clue for the highlighted squares, Split view shows that plus the next several clues, and Clues view shows all the clues in a list with the highlighted, finished, and unfinished clues in different colors or shades (tapping on a clue in Clues view selects it, but doesn’t take you to those squares in one of the other views-you have to manually switch). 2 Across has a more polished interface, with large buttons, puzzles that look like their print counterparts, the ability to control the clue font size, support for multiple letters in a square, and automatic skipping to the next clue. Puzzles aside, the big difference between the two apps is the way they let you enter clues and move around the grid.
Crosswords, however, does have a unique feature that lets you download all of a day’s puzzles with a single click.
Both apps let you enter your username and password in order to download daily puzzles from the New York Times if you subscribe to the publication’s puzzles (available free with a newspaper subscription, or separately for those who don’t get The Times delivered to their doors).
Both 2 Across and Crosswords give you access to many free puzzles from places including the Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post: 2 Across has the slight edge, however, by offering about twice as many puzzles, including puzzles from the Los Angeles Times and cryptics as well.