Magic Sudoku 4+

I bought this after seeing a Medium article by the author on how they wrote it. It was worth a shot, but I haven’t been able to get it to work on my 6S (iOS 11). I tried it on our local newspaper puzzle, then I thought maybe the contrast wasn’t high enough so I ran it through a copy machine. In every case, no matter how patiently I line up the squares exactly, it doesn’t recognize a puzzle. It also seems like it isn’t focusing properly on the page as the camera view is a bit fuzzy by the time I get the phone close enough to line up the squares. Gave it 3 stars for a cool concept, will upgrade later if I can get it to work reliably.

Sorry to hear that! We're definitely working on making things more robust. It sounds like the problem you're having might be due to the puzzle being too small for the 6S camera.

ARKit can't do auto-focus yet so if the puzzle is too small you have to get too close and it won't be in focus -- the plus sized models seem to do a better job but we're hoping Apple updates this in the future to get better up-close focus.

I do have some suggestions for things to try though:

1) The puzzle doesn't need to be lined up exactly; try backing up a bit so the squares are more in focus; it might work!

2) Try "scanning the room" a bit more before you scan the puzzle. The more data ARKit can extract from your environment the better it will do.

We're working on improving the UI of the app in the next version to suggest these things preemptively.

Finally, if you can send us a screenshot (or, better yet, a screen recording) of the app and a photo of the puzzle to our support team we can offer better suggestions and it will help us improve the app in future versions. Thanks in advance

- Brad

Update: We've tried to improve this in more recent versions. Is it working any better for you now?

It shows the solved puzzle upside down on iPhone SE, and it seems to need a high contrast to detect the puzzle. It wouldn’t pick it up from a kindle paperwhite screen, but it works from an iPad. Otherwise, it’s a good way to check kids who solve these in school without having to solve them all yourself.

Thanks for the feedback! The upside down puzzles should be fixed with version 1.1 which has already been submitted and is just waiting on approval from Apple. Hold tight; it should drop at any moment

The reason For the upside down puzzles is the devices orientation. On one of my camera apps has a leveler so that you can take the picture evenly instead tilted to one side. It’s like turning it sideways so you can take a Lynskey picture instead of portrait we’re looking at the different axis of this affect. It will turn the camera upside down when the device is near flat, even though it’s technically not upside down. There’s nothing you can do the person who has an of us has to make sure that it is properly oriented upright. Good app btw

Interesting! Thanks for the insights. I am pretty sure we ended up getting this fixed with the latest version. We had to do some vector math after the fact to determine whether it had been placed upside down and fix it after the fact. Might not be the most elegant solution but it seems to work!