If you like jigsaw puzzles and are isolated or stuck at home due to coronavirus and looking for things to do, try the Palapeli port, which is part of KDE Games 4.
Advantages are: - You can cut your own puzzles from your own photos, etc. - You can choose the number of pieces and the general shape, using any of several “slicer” modules. - When playing, the game saves its state to disk every two seconds. - It can handle puzzles up to 10,000 pieces in size, providing “holder” windows for subsets of pieces, such as Sky, Edges, etc. - The manual is comprehensive and is online at https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kdegames/palapeli/index.html or google kde docs palapeli. - An optional Preview window lets you see all or part of the completed puzzle. - The game is in good working order, except for occasional crashes with minor impact (see below). - You get a starter library of five easy puzzles and can add your own puzzles to it. Disadvantages are: - Palapeli takes a while to install under MacPorts, because it has a huge chain of dependencies via qt4-mac and kdelibs4, but you can break up the load by installing those two ports first from the binaries. - Pieces are not rotated when the puzzle is shuffled. - The functionality of the game has not changed for a few years: I was the last maintainer, but am retired from FOSS development now. - Crashes can occur when you move and join pieces rapidly: I was never able to find why, but the autosave feature (see above) ensures that you do not lose hours of work. - If you have a Linux system, Palapeli is available in a maintained KF5 version, but I don’t think there are many bug fixes or new features. “Palapeli" is a German word with a meaning something like “pell-mell” in English. Enjoy, Ian Wadham.
