More on Scrabulous

As Joshua pointed out, Scrabulous designers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla have created one of the most popular applications on Facebook. However, they’re not content to rest on their laurels. Instead, the designers have been constantly updating and improving the application, which at one point was averaging about one error message for every three attempts to access it. (Note: this is only based on my own experience.)

The application now offers right-click options if you click the board: you can cause the scoring numbers to appear (triple word score squares, etc.) or let Scrabulous access your camera and microphone. Presumably this is so you can chat with your fellow players in a realtime way, and not so that Scrabulous can record your face and voice and send it to the government. I never like to take chances on these things, myself. But the score-showing option is nice.

The design of the interface has been slightly modified as well and now looks cleaner and sleeker, with a better font and useful buttons.

Cooler than all of this (at least in my own mind, a land where coolness often gets all muddled up) is the sense that the brothers remain members of the Facebook community. The fact that they’re still working to improve the application, even though most of us will use it whether it gets better or not, speaks highly of their dedication to their fellow community members. I also enjoy the informal tone of some of their messages, such as a recent one that simply said “The ’tile placement’ bug is now fixed. Sorry, it was a result of talking on the phone while working!”

My only quarrel is the dictionary they’re using, which often refuses to accept words which may be slightly out of the common use but were perfectly ordinary in, say, Elizabethan times. However, you can easily get around this by playing games in “challenge” mode.

All in all, this is an application very much in keeping with the central tenet of Facebook: staying in touch with your friends. I’ve bitten chumps and tagged photos, and that was all nice, but now that I have Scrabulous I find I’m chatting with my good friend in Philly every day instead of once or twice a year. Nice work, Agarwallas.

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