October was a busy month for Ponder: two new families, sound, a rethink of Daily Bridges and a long list of smaller changes. Most of them started with something a player told us. Here’s what changed, and why.
Two new families
Bridges and Mini Sudoku joined on 11 October, taking Ponder to eight families. Each has a Learn to play board and a hundred boards at every difficulty in the Library, and both appear in the Daily set and the Weekly collection. Meet Bridges and Mini Sudoku covers how they work.
Sound
Moves, hints, conflicts and finished puzzles have short sounds now, on by default and easy to switch off. They confirm what you did and never whether it was right. How we chose Ponder’s sounds explains the rules behind them.
An easier Daily Bridges
Challenging Bridges turned out to be too slow as a Race stage, so from 14 October the Daily set uses Standard Bridges boards. The Library and Weekly collection keep their Challenging ones. Why Daily Bridges is now Standard has the details.
Leaving a board now asks first
Ponder doesn’t save unfinished moves; reopening a board starts it fresh. That was easy to forget, and one stray tap on Back could throw away ten minutes of work. Now, if you’ve made moves on a board you haven’t finished, leaving it asks you to confirm. That applies in the Library, the Weekly collection, Calm and Race.
Easier to talk about a board
Library boards show their number, such as “Gentle 07”, so you can tell a friend exactly which board beat you. Daily dates now read “14 October” rather than a string of numbers, and every Daily stage is named by its family. The Daily results page can share a short line with your result and a link to today’s puzzles, without giving away anything about the boards.
Shapes as well as colours
Each pair of Ribbons endpoints now has its own shape as well as its own colour. If two colours are hard to tell apart, the shapes still tell you which ends belong together.
Better on a keyboard
With nothing selected, the first arrow key now takes you into the board. Binary plays entirely with the arrows and Space. In Bridges, the arrows move between islands and each bridge is announced, so the board works with a screen reader. Ctrl or ⌘ with Z undoes a move, and adding Shift, or pressing Ctrl or ⌘ with Y, redoes it.
A countdown before the Race
Race now counts down 3, 2, 1 before the first board appears, so the start never takes you by surprise.
Fixes
- An update no longer interrupts a running Race. If a new version arrives mid-race, Ponder waits until you’ve left the Race before offering it.
- Chrome on iPhone played no sound at all. Browsers only allow sound after you touch the page, and Chrome on iPhone doesn’t count the start of a touch, so sound now starts when your finger lifts.
- On some phones, Mini Sudoku numbers spilled over the edges of their boxes when the board resized. The boxes now size themselves from the board’s width.
- The Light Up and Ribbons tools no longer drop below the board on a 1280 × 720 laptop screen.
- Signed-in players sometimes saw the first Weekly puzzle sit on its loading placeholder until they refreshed. A board was waiting for the account to finish catching up with every change since the last visit, which could take tens of seconds. Boards now wait at most two seconds and the catch-up carries on in the background.
Keep telling us
Almost everything on this list came from a message, a bug report or a comment from someone playing. If something in Ponder gets in your way, let us know. You can see what we’re working on next on the roadmap.