Feedback and Questions

I know what you mean. On my site I have deliberately concentrated on the logical steps that can be applied to any puzzle. The only thing we have to work with to make progress are the candidates in unsolved cells. Apart from Avoidable Rectangles strategy the solved cells provide no help whatsoever - provided you have cleared off candidates. There is a place for intuition and many people can bust through a bottleneck with an insightful guess and just a scattering of 'noted' candidates. But I was interested in the pure logic of Sudoku and that requires a full spread of all candidates. I know a lot of people use the solver to print out the board with candidates cleared off from the initial state. Then it's a process of elimination in each cell until one candidate is left. This saves you the bother of making the notes at the start, crossing them out is easy and you can use all the strategies you want, as listed on the site. Then when you feel confident about the patterns you might spot them with just notes added rather than subtracted. But everyone has a personal approach.

Note, most of the 'extreme' strategies, while logically correct, involve very complex patterns that really most people are not expected to use on a daily basis. I collect them because in some very special Sudoku puzzles they really are the only way to make process. Sudoku can be very deep.

You need to tick a box in your print options to "print background colors and images". It varies from browser to browser, some advice here applies:
http://www.str8ts.com/Printing_the_Daily_Str8ts.html

Very glad you like the puzzles

Not in Sudoku since the numbers are merely placeholders, they could be letters or types of fruit. But addition is used in Killer Sudoku
http://www.sudokuwiki.org/Innies_and_Outies
a lot and also in kenKen and Kendoku, eg
http://www.sudokuwiki.org/Rule_of_21
(also Rule of 45 for 9x9 puzzles)

On vacation at the moment. But I am working on a solver/generator for this variant of puzzle. I believe it is also call Windoku, my preferred name.
Will post on the site when it's available
And no, the normal solver wont cut it

Edit: Nov 2015 - windoku now released!

Thanks. BTW, you send a private message but no email address. Can't answer those!

Well done, I find the coding this stuff very satisfying

I'm hoping this is just the updated pages I posted to take the solver to 2.02. If you still see 2.01 on the solver then fresh a few times (F5) or clear your cache. Always happens, its just not possible to invisibly update under peoples feet with this internet stuff

Let me know is that doesn't solver it

Very sorry to confuse you, my bad. The update doesn’t effect Killer but since they share a common core engine I should have remembered to increment the version number everywhere. Done so now, working again for me. Once F5 refresh should do it – should say 2.02 now

I've looked at the app and it does remove candidates if you press take step a few times. But I think you are talking about a "player mode" as opposed to a "solver mode". I am thinking about how to add that but it's not very easy as the candidates are incompatible, one has to be manually editing candidates as opposed to allow the solver to remove them. I agree that in "player mode" the candidates can be removed automatically. I am about to release version 1.74 today which contains some improvements, including a LONG click on the numbers - which inserts the big number instead of a candidate. This means its one "take step" to clear. On your main point I'll develop further and see if I can add "player" mode.

Very happy it's been helpful, your most welcome