Show HN: My saturday project. For when your co-founders can't 'Draw Something'. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My saturday project. For when your co-founders can't 'Draw Something'.

omghalp.com

54 pointssgk28448 comments

Funny, I wrote a script for my girlfriend a week ago too. I just grabbed my word list from /usr/share/dict/words though.

https://gist.github.com/2069501

Update: use the official word list from DrawSomething...

Real awesome tool, great job Steve.

On a side note though, anyone who seriously uses this tool to play 'Draw Something' is missing out on the concept of the game, which is to use your creativity to draw up something that users can then guess.

If you're using a tool to help you guess a word the correct word, then you're doing the "drawer" a disservice by basically saying to them that their drawing is good enough, when it really isn't... seeing as you couldn't guess what it was.

It's like funding a start up that you know is destined to fail and you keep telling them to keep on keeping on with the doomed idea; or in this case, their crappy drawings that you can't guess!

While I agree with you in spirit, I just want to point out that it's not always the drawer's fault that you don't recognize a pop culture reference ("katniss") or something a bit obscure ("golem").

Also, you might have too much riding on the game if you can use startup funding as an analogy!

I think you're sort of missing the point of the game, which is to be a game. If you're cheating anyone, it's yourself. Cheating (unless you're developing the cheat yourself) is almost never fun for more than 3 minutes.

It would be nice if you made the text "Draw Something" in the subtitle link to the app. I didn't know what Draw Something was, but clicked the link anyway, assuming I could figure it out by analogy to hangman and Pictionary by looking at your site's interface. I couldn't; I had to look it up.

Possible link destinations:

http://omgpop.com/drawsomething

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/draw-something-free/id4886282...

Thanks for the suggestion! Just deployed a new version that links to their page.

This is just a quick project I threw together this Saturday. It simply finds all possible words that meet the criteria you specify and ranks them according to their English frequency.

I'm surprised that domain name was available :)

Which wordlist/dictionary are you using? I use WordNet for my word finding app: http://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/

FYI, the search is broken right now, probably due to HN traffic. I get the error: Internal Server Error.

I tried the word 'parallelogram'. The web page keeps changing 13 letters to 12 letters in the number of letters box then saying it can't find a word.

I've never heard of 'draw something' as a game before so perhaps I'm using a word that isn't allowed or something.

Stuff like this is handy in teaching especially if it works on a mobile phone (blackberry for teenagers, iPhone for colleagues :-)

Hey, thanks for the feedback. You can only specify 12 letters, so it doesn't make sense to search for a 13 letter word.

Re: teaching, I'll clean up the code a bit and put it up on github. There isn't anything too novel in there though.

Here ya go: https://github.com/stevekrenzel/omghalp

Steve, "Scoutzie" is not a word! ugh :) It's good to see you guys are still having fun!

Haha, thanks Kirill :) Everyday you gotta have fun!

Is this is an acceptable convention in US: http://omgpop.com/drawsomething says that the app is available at .99 cents (Get it now: .99 cents)?

Related: Verizon Math http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/

No, that's definitely wrong. It's a common error, though, and in a lot of cases people don't even notice (especially when it's clear that it doesn't sell for part of a cent).

I've actually been using this for awhile: http://www.justin.my/draw-something-words/

Cool - where are you sourcing the candidate words?

I used the frequency lists from Wikitionary for searching an ranking. They've got the 40,000 most frequent words.

The client downloads the current word list from this URL: http://static.iminlikewithyou.com/drawsomething/wordlist.csv

I've been meaning to see if I can run a proxy and substitute my own words.

EDIT: I personally use wordplay (http://hsvmovies.com/static_subpages/personal_orig/wordplay/...) with the -lx flags on this file when I'm stumped

Nice! Steve - can you use this word list instead? (http://static.iminlikewithyou.com/drawsomething/wordlist.csv)

Yep, the site includes that word list now :)

Wow, great find. Obviously using the actual list would be a lot more helpful since they often combine multiple words into one ("lavalamp", "musicbox") and use a lot of very current pop culture references ("lin", "ladygaga"). Definitely a unique dictionary.

Wow thanks for the link to the csv. I just pushed a new version that uses that list!

You can use a proxy and substitute your words. Also take in mind that the format is <word>,<score (1,2,3)>,<premium word or not (0 or 1)>

took the best methods from this comments here and put the in an ios app: CheatSomething! is free in the AppStore: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...

you should consider allowing users to input all the letters into one single input box, might just a little bit less effort for the users =)

You can just keep typing while you're in the first text box :)

I'm glad you noticed that! I added it as a convenience for myself when testing it... and wasn't sure if anyone else would discover it :)

Would be even nicer if the cursor also moved!

Yeah, I played around with that. On the iPhone they disable allowing you to programmatically focus input fields in Safari (from what I could tell). So rather then spend time on a work around, since this was just a fun side project, I figured I'll ship it as is.

Fair enough! It's not up on github is it?

There wasn't anything too novel in the code, but I've gotten enough requests at this point that I'll look into throwing it up on github.

I'll keep an eye on it and see if I can send you a pull request :)

Here it is: https://github.com/stevekrenzel/omghalp

Why "co-founders"? Surely you mean co-players

Heh, it was a jab at my co-founders.

nice.. so you put a limit on the number of letters, and shuffle the letters in all possible combinations searching your wictionary. Interesting.

Thanks :) I also order the results based on frequency and I just pushed an update to the site that uses the official word list of "Draw Something".

500 Server error.

That went well.

There's no need for that. Why do you feel you need to be sarcastic and rude?

I'm sorry everyone can't be nice on the internets.

This is Hacker News. Learn the etiquette.

http://www.omghalp.com/?length=6&char=b&char=a&c...

indeed

Yes, it turns out that the game gives you a selection of letters, like Scrabble, to fill in all the text fields shown. You get the 500 error if you leave the text fields blank. It would be nice if the site gave a JavaScript alert instead of submitting the form with invalid input.

Unfortunately, that was a bug. If the number of characters you provided was less than the length of the word you gave, the server 500'd.

Oops! Sorry about that, the link should be fixed now!

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