Paint by Numbers - new interface

Here's another version of the Paint by Numbers Java applet.

The main difference in using it is the way the colors are selected. Instead of using different mouse buttons or holding down different keys on the keyboard while dragging the mouse, we now have buttons on the screen that you press to select the colors.

Another slight difference is that the logic to determine which blocks are 'good' or 'bad' has changed a little. And the 'bad' blocks are now marked in pink instead of red, to make it easier to read the numbers.

An alternative to hitting the buttons with the mouse is to use keyboard shortcuts. If you mouse with your right hand, then you can use the 'a', 's' and 'd' keys to switch between colors. Or if you mouse with your left hand, then the ';', 'l' and 'k' keys will work.

For those interested in the Java workings, the new applet uses Swing components instead of graphics primitives wherever possible. It's also been updated to use the new event model. And it now reads the colors it needs out of the data, instead of hardcoding them to black and white.

What, you say? How silly to get the colors from the data when they're always going to be black and white anyway! Oh, yeah. There's one new feature that I forgot to mention:

We can do puzzles in color now.

The idea is that you can now have two or three dark colors on a white background. You do the puzzles the same way, counting back and forth to figure out where the colored squares go.

There's one tricky bit with the colored puzzles. Two adjacent dark blocks, if they're of different colors, might, or might not, have a white square between them.

( This set of puzzles was created with Java 1.3.1. If the java on your computer is too old, it might not be able to display them. You might want to download a newer version from java.sun.com. )

Here's a few more puzzles to play with:

16x16:	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30	31	32	33	34	35	36	37	38	39	40
	41	42	43	44	45	46	47	48	49	50	51	52	53	54	55	56	57	58	59	60
	61	62	63	64	65	66	67
20x20:	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30	31	32	33	34	35	36	37	38	39	40
	41	42	43	44	45	46	47	48	49	50	51	52	53	54	55	56	57	58	59	60
	61	62	63	64	65	66	67
24x24:	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30	31	32	33	34	35	36	37	38	39	40
	41	42	43	44	45	46	47	48	49	50	51	52	53	54	55	56	57	58	59	60
	61	62	63	64

Here are some harder ones:

16x16:	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
20x20:	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11
24x24:	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9

And here's a program for solving these multi-colored puzzles.