[jlees]

Looks like many of us had the same idea here. I've been trying to hack together iOS OCR libraries but realised it's actually quite doable without, so derailed a little and therefore got beaten to the post by you all :-) My thought being that the lowest level of friction always wins.

The other option would be to use some magic similar to Dropbox's Camera Upload to automatically save screenshots in the cloud, check whether they're Letterpress, and run server side analysis with a push notification. Feels like a gaping privacy hole there, so I didn't investigate.

My motivation is that a lot of the opponents I've been playing are coming up with the craziest words (and I'm a fairly literate person and regular Scrabble player). At that point, it just boils down to who has the best cheat program :-)

[biturd]

Why not just have the user submit a screenshot? Safari supports file uploads now so you could go 100% web based if desired. Or if you are iOS fluent, you could make an app that takes the screenshot for you by grabbing the last picture in your camera roll.

From there, with how simple the board UI is, it should be pretty easy to OCR it. Drop the color and you are 90% there.

There was a Where's Waldo post on HN about 2 days ago. Finding Waldo in that mess involved a bit more work and thought to chose what to look for. In this case it was the bands in the striped shirt that were most if the give-away.

I think you could do a nice app in iOS, though I personally hate the cheating apps. I wish games like Words With Friends, Scrabble, etc., would tell you if the player was in game or not, and possibly what app they switched to. Or provide a lockout mode where switching costs you the game.

Multi-tasking is a needed ability at times, and done games are long play, but certain cheater friends could be locked into a game they can't cheat in, which would be a nice feature.