Blank grid mode

When you launch MagicSudoku, it first opens with a blank grid. This mode allows you to manually enter a grid from a newspaper or any other source of sudoky grid. A limited toolbar that looks like this is available in this mode:

Notice the little down arrow over the "5" button by default. This arrow indicates which mode is currently active. The first button, which is labelled "5" allows you to enter the digits and the second button "0" allows you to erase a wrong or misplaced digit. It basically resets a cell.

When in the digit entering mode, simply click on the little numbers inside the cells in the grid to place a digit. If you want to place the digit 2 in a particular cell, you click on the little 2 (middle upper) inside this particular cell. To erase a digit, simply switch to erasing mode by clicking on the "0" in the toolbar and then click anywhere in the cell you want to erase.

Once you are done entering all the digits of your grid, click on the "lock" button in the toolbar to enter the solving mode.


Solving mode

The solving mode is the main mode of MagicSudoku. When you are in this mode, you get the full toolbar at the bottom of the screen:

The first four buttons are a tool used to color the background of cells. This technique is often useful with some advanced solving techniques or simply to help identify certain cells in a grid. Maybe you'd want to highlight all the cells that can still accept a particular digit for example. To do this, simply click on a color button and then click on some cells to color those. If you click again on a cell that is already colored, it will simply swicth it back to a white background. If you want to get rid of all the colors at once, click on the "X" button in the toolbar.

The three middle buttons in the toolbar are the main buttons used to either enter a digit in a cell, erase a digit of enable/disable the pencilmarks (little numbers) in a cell. Simple click on the button corresponding to the action you want to do and then click on the cells in the grid. The "123" button is used to work with pencilmarks and the "5" button to enter digits while the "0" button with reset the cell you click. When using the "123" or "5" mode, pay attention to where you click inside a cell, since it corresponds to the digit you want to work with. Even if you dont use the pencilmakrs, the little numbers are always visible in light grey inside all the cells to help you visualize which digit you are clicking on.

The next 3 buttons in the toolbar ("?", "all off", "all on") are used to work with pencilmarks. The "all off" and "all on" buttons will obviously turn all the pencilmarks in all the cells on or off. The "?" button with automatically disable all the pencilmarks that are currently basically impossible in the grid.

By basically impossible, I mean that it will simply check if a digit is already present in a peer cell of a particular cell and if so, it will disable this digit in this cell. It wont make any other deduction that checking the row, column and box of a cell. So, at any time, if you want MagicSudoku to show you only the basically possible pencilmarks in all the cells, first click the "all on" button, and then the "?" button, which will disable all the impossibles pencilmarks. This technique is very useful to solve a sudoku and MagicSudoku will do it for you a lot faster that you could do it by hand.

After that, if you make some deductions by yourself, you can always switch to "123" mode to manually disable some more digits that will eventually lead to placing a specific digit in a cell. When you place a new digit, hit the "?" button again to make MagicSudoku automatically disable all the pencilmarks that the newly placed digit now renders basically impossible.

Last but not least, the "V" button will verify the current state of the grid to see if a digit is currently wrong. All it does is actually checking that each digit only appears once in a row, column or box, which again is only what you would do by hand. MagicSudoku doesnt actually solve the grid and check if the currently placed digit are correct, it simple check that the basic principle of a valid sudoku grid are respected so far.


Menu

The menu of MagicSudoku is quite straight forward. You can select the New item which will allow you to choose an empty grid, which simply gets you back to the same state as when you lauch MagicSudoku. The new item also offers three levels of generated sudoku grid (Easy, Medium, Hard). I added the auto generated grids just for fun, since I am in no way a sudoku master and dont have the required math knowledge to write a good sudoku generator. Actually, I used a simple algotythm that was freely available on the web to implement the grid generation functionnality. If you like it, you can use it, but the grid it generates are quite simple, even the hard ones are not that hard.

The save and load menu items simply allows you to save or load the current grid state. Nothing much to say here.

The solve item will actually try to solve the current grid, but again, I didnt write the algorythm and it wont solve anything but the easy grids. MagicSudoku is really not intended to be a good automatic solver.

Finally, the Quit item in the menu will obviously exit the program.