nsSudoku is a Sudoku helper. Originally designed simply to provide a nice printout for the local newspaper's 9x9 and 16x16 Sudokus for solving by pencil-and-eraser, I fell into the programmer's trap of adding features until it can now assist the solver to work out the puzzle on-screen. Unfortunately that means (if you allow it to give you hints — you don't have to!) it makes the local paper's puzzles pretty trivial, because even their so-called 5* difficulty puzzles usually only require forced moves. But Sudoku which require deeper strategies are still interesting and nsSudoku can be a nice helper to keep track of things when pencil-and-paper becomes too confusing. I stopped short of providing a complete solution because a) what would be the point (it is not interesting that a computer can easily solve these things by brute force!) and b) there is a nice Sudoku solver out there for the Mac called Sudoku Susser which does that and much more usefully shows and explains the strategies applied at each step of the solution [Sudoku Susser is available at www.madoverlord.com — I recommend it].

Because I wrote this for my own use, please note a few caveats: it was designed for a minimum 17" screen* (but see below for a smaller version), the printout is auto-scaled for an A4 page (you may have to use the page setup dialog to rescale to suit US letter page) and it lacks a few small refinements such as a proper application icon and more importantly a manual (email me to figure out how to edit and use the hints if it isn't clear! A help file will be added if there is interest.)

nsSudoku is a freeware application for Mac OS X 10.3.x/10.4.

Download it here... version 1.0 (44 Kb download) a slight update just added - you can set forced moves to be automatically made.

Download it here... nsSudoku-S version 1.0 (44 Kb download) This is a slightly modified version arranged to fit onto a 15" screen (1024x768 pixel resolution); the 16x16 grid does not have room to display the file name, but everything else works. You may have to experiment with scaling a print-out to get the best size for hard copy, particularly if you are not using A4 paper.

For further information contact the author
Neville Smythe at
Neville.Smythe@anu.edu.au