The Jigsaw... Re-imagined

I've always loved the jigsaw puzzle. There's something uniquely satisfying about putting together small indistinguishable parts into a unified whole, where the final product is something much more than the sum of its parts. In a way, it is something like creating a software program--little bits of logic that are combined together in a specific pattern to emerge as an entity that has a specific structure and function, as well as beauty.

I set a goal to design an app that has the qualities of a jigsaw puzzle, but one that is more suited for the iPhone. I had two constraints:

• all the pieces should be visible
• no scrolling of the image should be necessary

Given the relatively small screen real estate, I did not want to split the screen into a holding bin and a picture area. That meant that the pieces and the picture would occupy the same space. The obvious solution, given these constraints, is tile swapping, i.e. the image will be formed by swapping the tiles amongst themselves.

I played around with various tile shapes and settled on hexagonal tiles. Not only do they make a nice pattern, but I felt that hexagonal tiles would be novel for a jigsaw puzzle.