JustJigsaw Logo

Just Jigsaw

For PalmOS, and Symbian OS (Series 60, Siemens SX1, Nokia Communicator)


It was designed to look like a real jigsaw, and this is how the screen shots really do. Once you start playing,  you realise that this is not quite the same: in particular, you can't  stick one frame to another, like you do in real life.  Nevertheless this implementation looks much closer  to the real life  than any other Palm-based jigsaws I've seen, and it has a variety of options for getting it less realistic ... but often more convenient to play. :=)

The only software I know to work in a similar way was xjig a  real masterpiece for X-Windows (a great system that by no means has  to be confused with a similarly named but and awful counterpart) written by Helmut Hoenig in 1996.  I couldn't use the source code because of having troubles with understanding someone else's logic (others have similar problems with mine).  It appears that with limited resources, I couldn't implement  Helmut's design anyway.

I started with xjig design of joining  frames into bigger ones and eventually into the whole image, but soon realised than Palm speed was insufficient for moving big frames. With enormous regret I adopted a less intuitive approach of sticking frames to board. Soon I realised that the second scheme has an advantage also from the player's prospective especially with big images that couldn't fit into a small PDA screen and required scrolling.

Another crucial problem specific to Palm was the absence of mouse button which caused problems with  differentiation between move, rotation, and flip. The Palm version of JJig gives you a variety of ways to do that, but still with pointer buttons it would obviously be much more intuitive. The first PalmOS release appeared as an Easter present in April 2002.

Since  mobile phones usually don't have even a stylus,  the mobile version appeared unthinkable, but once I found about Nokia 7650 and 3650 with built in cameras and excellent image processing tools, I couldn't miss the chance. Fortunately mobile devices have much more buttons than Palm, and this allowed a very elegant solution to the problem: you simply have two modes - one for moving cursor and selecting a frame, and another for operating selected frame;   you have separate buttons for move, rotation and flip which you can't have in Palm !

For Nokia Series 60 the code was almost completely rewritten, however the "sticky design" remained even though the CPU is fast enough  for something better... sorry, we are slightly behind the schedule and can't wait till next Easter :=) .

Enjoy
February 2003



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Jigsaw for PalmOS

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© 2002, Michael Glickman <palmcrust@yahoo.com>