NYT Crossword Puzzle No Longer Works In Third-Party Apps (theverge.com) 39
People will no longer be able to play the digital version of The New York Times daily crossword puzzle in third-party apps, according to an announcement made by the Times on Monday. The Verge reports: Starting August 10th, the crossword will be available digitally only via the NYT site or on its own crossword app. Downloadable PDFs, in addition to the physical newspaper, will still be available for people who want to print and play. Until now, crosswords were available in the Across Lite .puz file format, so anyone with a Times games subscription could download a puzzle and open it in the desktop or mobile app of their choice. The change applies not just to future puzzles but to the archive of puzzles that are currently in the .puz format.
Everdeen Mason, editorial director of games at the Times, said on Twitter that she made the decision to end .puz support in an effort to build something where editors can "edit and make games rather than adapt things for tools we can't control."
Everdeen Mason, editorial director of games at the Times, said on Twitter that she made the decision to end .puz support in an effort to build something where editors can "edit and make games rather than adapt things for tools we can't control."
Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
said on Twitter that she made the decision to end .puz support in an effort to build something where editors can "edit and make games rather than adapt things for tools we can't control."
If NYT doesn't want to share the puzzles they create that's their right, but it would be nice if they were just upfront about it and didn't try to excuse it in such a laughable way. It can't be much if any work at all to provide something as simple as a crossword puzzle in a common format.
Re: Sure... (Score:3)
Which tells me that it's all about tracking.
Every time I see a case of things that can be easily done on a web page but an app is pushed I 'know' it's a tracking attempt.
Re: Sure... (Score:3)
"Starting August 10th, the crossword will be available digitally only via the NYT site ..."
It's literally in the first sentence, no app required.
Re: (Score:2)
"Starting August 10th, the crossword will be available digitally only via the NYT site ..."
It's literally in the first sentence, no app required.
Sure, but as their website states "You need a subscription to see this puzzle." So, the parent post's point that "I 'know' it's a tracking attempt" is still valid.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
They are sharing - you could use their app, or print the PDF. They just wanted to stop using a 3rd party format they didn't control.
Perhaps they changed how their back end works which broke their tool that they used to mak
Re:Sure... (Score:5, Informative)
Usually I’d fully agree with your cynicism. Here though, the truth is that NYT XWords are getting more and more feature laden (overlays, graphics, double sized boxes, &c) that other vendors can’t manage. Not only that but some of the 3rd party software doesn’t handle rebuses correctly: check out Thursday Wordplay blog comments, it’s a big deal.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Informative)
Out of all of the crummy comments in this article (thus far), the parent is the only one who is actually adding something of value. It's not unusual for the NYT to do a non-standard crossword, especially on Thursday.
Re: (Score:3)
Those reasons don't excuse removing many years of existing puzzles. Leaving them alone takes no effort on their part. They can make all the non-standard puzzles they want going forward without touching the previously published files.
If they did it going forward, saying that only new puzzles would be in their custom format, it would be different. Instead they're locking everything away. As others point out, this is nearly always for tracking purposes. They could quite easily keep publishing the new data fil
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Dropping it now means not having to make the decision later, and future resources will not be tied to something no longer in production.
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It will still be available in a common format: PDF.
It really seems to me that it should be possible to automate converting from PDF back to the .puz format.
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Today I started looking at the possibility of parsing a downloaded NYT Crossword PDF. Parsing the puzzle looks very easy when using the the ancient utility pdft2xml to convert the PDF to XML. It does a great job. It outputs an XML file, which can be parsed to find the clues and numbered squares, and a VEC file, which is an xml representation of the grid (very similar to SVG) and can be parsed to identify each square of the grid as open or closed.
Next up is to examine how to export to the PUZ format.
pdf2xml
All about the $.$$ (Score:3)
Everdeen Mason, editorial director of games at the Times, said on Twitter that she made the decision to end .puz support in an effort to build something where editors can "edit and make games rather than adapt things for tools we can't control."
Re: All about the $.$$ (Score:3)
This only affects paid subscribers, so, yes, they sell the game subscriptions to make money.
Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And we all lose because the only "winners" left standing will be FOX and CNN. Just like we get the government we vote for, we get the news we pay for.
Re: Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (Score:1)
It's not like we would be losing an unbiased source. The NYT has been pretty far left for a long time. I welcome it's demise and hopefully weâ(TM)ll learn a lesson about telling one-sides stories in the name of âoenewsâ.
Re: Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think the NYT is Far Left, you should hear what actual leftists think of it.
Re: Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
the oligarchy and corporate elite of New York City, the financial capital of the global empire
What do you think the leadership of the far left is? Some hipster with a man bun?
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That's the problem, we DON'T get the news we're (willing) to pay for.
I would pay $1000 a year for access to whatever I imagine Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook and Elon Musk read at their breakfast tables... except I'd bet $5000 that those guys are watching Fox News and CNN and MSNBC, and reading the NYT and the WSJ and their local rag, just like everybody else.
Somebody please sell me an awesome news service, zero BS, zero ads, intelligence-grade journalism and analysis. Don't think I'll pay for it?
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Agreed but in this case I started playing the Mini nyt crossword (the real one is not free) and found out you have to know things like ant-man's partner's name and other popular name crap. Not for me.
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This boat ain't sinking. (Score:2)
Re: Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (Score:2)
That was true in the ~2010 era, but now they've stabilized. Revenue is increasing and profits are stable:
https://www.macrotrends.net/st... [macrotrends.net]
Unlike a lot of local newspapers the nationally-recognized ones seem to have weathered the storm. Not quite where they were in the early 2000's but not the Titanic.
Personally, I don't pay a subscription and do their (free) mini crossword instead, trying solve it in under 60 s. Spelling Bee is also a great puzzle.
Why is this trifle considered tech news? (Score:2)
SSL.
Poor excuse (Score:2)
end .puz support in an effort to build something where editors can "edit and make games rather than adapt things for tools we can't control."
Application / API / file format incompatibilty is something that happens with complex software. But this is a effing CROSSWORD PUZZLE ferchrissage: it's a grid with letters and blacked out boxes. You can implement a crossword puzzle in Word, Excel, Perl, COBOL, as a Vim extension, Emacs (might be too simple for Emacs though...), Minecraft, SolidWorks, TurboTax, plain text ASCII without unicode support (hint hint @Slashdot), Lego mindstorm...
I don't buy that excuse. More likely NYT just wanted to fire the g
Re: (Score:2)
More likely NYT just wanted to fire the guy in charge of maintaining the .puz generator script to save a bit of money.
Being the NYT, I suspect they're planning some failed attempt to monetize the crossword puzzle, and want to end any means of people getting access to it without paying.
Re: (Score:2)
That's possible. But the NY Times Crossword is rather famous; so it might also just be they think doing this will lead to some non-trivial number of new subscriptions to their "paper".
Re: Poor excuse (Score:4, Informative)
You already have to subscribe to get the full crossword puzzle.
Duh.
Re: Poor excuse (Score:2)
Then OCR the puzzle rendered on their website, holy Jebus are you all making a mountain out of an ant turd.
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I guess you never actually DO the NYT puzzles. They often have 'non-standard' puzzles, with things like 2 letters (or a number) in a box. Sometimes they use rebuses. Does your Word, Excel, Perl, COBOL. etc implementation handle that?
Petty excuses (Score:2)
Re: Petty excuses (Score:3)
If they want money from this, it is sad, as there is no money in their puzzles.
You might want to let them know that, because they've been selling their crossword puzzles with a stand-alone game subscription for a while now numbnuts.
https://www.nytimes.com/subscr... [nytimes.com]
AcrossLite *is* a terrible format (Score:5, Informative)
I've developed a crossword puzzle app that parses AcrossLite .puz files. It REALLY IS a terrible file format, and I understand why the NYT wants to ditch it:
- It only supports the Windows-1252 character set (no full Unicode support), so constructors can't put a lot of foreign words in their puzzles (hi there, Slashdot!)
- It doesn't support any kinds of non-standard clue numbering. If there are two or more white cells in a row, there MUST be a clue number in the first, and no clue numbers allowed anywhere else. This precludes certain types of gimmick puzzles.
- It supports rebuses (multiple letters in a square) but only in a very limited way. It doesn't allow you to put certain punctuation in a cell, and a cell can only have one possible solution to it that's considered correct. Some gimmick puzzles have e.g. rebus squares with different letters used for the across vs. down entries, or some kind of rebus where it's not totally clear exactly which letters you need to type in for the app to consider it correct.
- It supports having circles in certain cells in the grid, but that's it for special formatting/embellishments. Some puzzles have e.g. shaded cells or other modifications in the print version that don't translate into the .puz file; they either get replaced by circles, or a message in the notepad
- It doesn't support diagonal clues/entries or other metapuzzle-like elements, aside from writing some words in the notepad.
- It doesn't support having any kind of images in the grid
- It doesn't support having a 'connect-the-dots' solution that some puzzles use to e.g. have the solver draw a picture at the end
Now granted, most of these features are pure gimmick (except for Unicode support, I mean c'mon) and it hasn't been a huge loss not to have them for decades, but they do limit what the constructors and editors are able to achieve.
Are there better puzzle formats out there? YES! There are two other significantly better file formats out there that I'm aware of: .jpz and .ipuz. I haven't worked with these as extensively so can't speak much from experience, but I do know they're far superior to AcrossLite's .puz format. They're not as well-supported by as many third-party apps as .puz, but they do exist.
Instead of ditching third-party apps completely, NYT should be the leaders in this space by switching to one of those other formats.
Re: AcrossLite *is* a terrible format (Score:2)