Using technology to augment puzzle solving in real time.
Lately I've been having lots of conversations about augmented reality. Not the marker/webcam type, but just the general idea of using technology to augment the world we experience. While there is a lot of cool marker/webcam stuff, it's not really "useful" yet. That why I love it when I see stuff like this new feature for an iPhone app called Sodoku Grab that can read the puzzle you're looking at and overlay answers (or tips) in real time.
As a total aside, it reminds me of another puzzle cheating story. A few years ago I had a few thousand people land on a random entry via the search term "tom wolfe catchphrase 1970s." Confused, I quickly put up a page with that title and asked people what the hell they were looking for. As it turned out, they were all trying to cheat on their New York Times crossword puzzle. The clue was "Tom Wolfe catchphrase popularized in the 1970s" and that had randomly landed on my site. If you're ever wondering about some of the more random phrases that pop up in Google Hot Trends, now you know.
[Via Beyond the Beyond]