Pavan Podila's Blog

Polarium cleanups + a cool new feature

Yesterday night I spent a lot of time playing some of the puzzles from Polarium Puzzle archive. The way I was going about playing them was to copy the puzzle code, paste it into a file, save it, and then load it up in the app. After playing about 5 puzzles I realized the inconvenience in doing that again and again. I had to come up with a better way of doing that and reduce the number of steps required to play a puzzle.

After a few minutes of thinking about this, I came up with the idea of using the Clipboard directly. I would right-click two times on the Polarium title text:


to invoke the level-load operation. At this point, I would check if the Clipboard has any text, and if it did I would call the PolariParser to load the level. Note that this works only for the NintendoDS format. I think I am going to totally remove the support for the B/W/G format, since nobody seems to be using that.

This required me to make some changes to the Parser. Previously all the input used to come from a file. This had to be changed so that I could load directly from text. With all that in place, things are much more comfortable:

1. Copy the puzzle code from the archive
2. Right-click 2 times on the Polarium title
3. Get the grey-cells working on the puzzle!

Besides this I have also cleaned up the code with some refactorings. This should make it more readable.

Download Source and Binaries (v2.1)

posted by Pavan Podila @ 1:28 PM