The "next generation" of daily puzzles are proceeding apace. There's a bit more to show off.

1. The first cut of my "standard" score-pause-volume display. All of the games will eventually have the same layout of stuff along the bottom of the window. It's not really necessary, but I never did like the current method of "put the controls wherever they'll fit on the screen". Since you can be generous with vertical space (given that browsers are vertically-scrolling things), I decided that I'll give each game more vertical space if necessary and give every game the same score layout.

2. The first cut of my "standard" popup-dialog-box-thingy. Every game currently has hand-drawn and coded dialogs. I have made a little effort to go back and make all the popups look similar in all of the games, but that doesn't change the problem that many of my dialogs work differently from game to game (and some stuff is just broken, like being able to press "pause" while entering your name). So for this I made a little self-resizing popup box that obscures the game (to discourage cheat-by-pause, ala the XBox 360 "blade" popups) and disables all buttons below it. Retrofitting the earlier games will be a pain, but it won't be the first time. I like the way it works, but I'm not wild about the color. I was going for a tasteful beige, but I ended up with a weird fleshy pink.

3. Login and logout. I think the whole scheme there is working as well as it needs. You can now log in and save your login info as a Flash-cookie. You're genty ushered to the account-o-matic page if you don't have a log in. You can also log out with a warning dialog. I went with the most braindead (and easy to maintain) scheme possible for logging out --delete the login Flash-cookies and refresh the browser. I'm using &#106avascript to refresh the Window, but since nobody's yet complained about the other &#106avascript on the pages (namely framebuster scripts and SWFObject), I'm not too worried about that.<br><br>4. Spinny loading thing. The games are pretty small so loading's not really much of an issue. I have noticed that sometimes my ISP is a mite slow in validating the game. Since I'm now basically doing two passes of validating (validate and login), I'm adding a little colorful spinny-thing in glorious ROYGBIV.<br><br><br>So that's where I am. IMHO, it's more world-class than my previous efforts. It'll be a pain to go back and update the old games, but the results will be worth it.<br><br><A HREF="http://www.thecodezone.com/games/pokerpatience.php">http://www.thecodezone.com/games/pokerpatience.php</A><br><br><br>On another note, somebody has contacted me about helping me port <A HREF="http://www.thecodezone.com/downloads/sqlite.html">SQLiteZinc</A> to OSX. Since that's really the only hurdle remaining for OSX versions of daily puzzles, I'm happy.<div> </div>