My Love/Hate Relationship with OmniCrosswords

Blogging, family, humor 2 Minutes

I’ve written a few posts about my desire to get better at solving crossword puzzles, but I soon realized desire wasn’t enough.

So I started looking for apps that might help, and I came across one called Omni Crosswords. While it doesn’t offer any techniques to improve your ability, what it does offer is a wide array of daily crossword puzzles. The app includes the following puzzles:

  • New York Times (delayed by two weeks)
  • New York Times mini
  • USA Today
  • Universal
  • LA Times
  • Newsday
  • The Atlantic
  • New Yorker

It also used to include the Wall Street Journal, but for some reason it stopped carrying its daily crossword puzzle.

I find it impressive that it offers all of these puzzles for free. And it supports my belief that perhaps the best way to get better at crosswords is to just do more crosswords.

Since it is an app, it offers certain advantages over trying to solve the puzzles by hand. For example, you can have the app automatically check your solutions in real time as you type in your answers, so that you know if you are using the right letters. You can also turn such a feature on at any time to check your progress, since it will show you what you’ve gotten wrong, and then you can  turn  the feature right back off. Many times I will keep such a feature turned off until I get stuck, and then keep it on until I finish. I think it has definitely helped with my ability to solve crossword puzzles.

So what’s the downside?

Just like checking my stats, I find the app quite addictive.

When I first downloaded the app, I was trying all of the puzzles every day. I quickly gave up on that, since it was eating up a lot (and I mean a lot) of my time. I then settled on just doing the two New York Times puzzles, USA Today, and Universal (since other than the daily NYT puzzles, these were fairly easy). It still is a decent  commitment of time, but not as much as it was.

I blame part of my hiatus from blogging on this app. I found there wasn’t enough time in the day to do both, and the puzzles won out.

But then once I did start to learn to manage my crossword puzzle time more effectively, Apple had the nerve to came out with its own puzzle app as part of Apple News. I ended up adding Apple’s daily puzzle,  mini puzzle, and an interesting puzzle called quartiles to my daily routine.

After I while, I realized once again that I was spending way too much time trying to solve these puzzles. Something had to go, so I stopped doing USA Today and Universal.

That saved a bit of time, but I still spend more time doing puzzles than I should.

One side effect of this better time management is that I feel like I have time to do some blogging.

So if you were wondering where I’ve been, there’s part of the answer.

It’s still a balancing act, currently made easier by the fact that I am  currently on semester break, and so I have more time available to do both the blogging and the puzzles.

The real test will be when school starts up next week. But the hope this time is that if I have to choose, I will lean more towards blogging than crosswords.

I’ll end with a crossword clue:

  • what is the most painful thing you’ve done so far in 2025 (15 letters)
  • readingthispost
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Published by Jim Borden

A 60-something guy trying to figure out the world, and his place in it. Happily married for 40-plus years, three wonderful sons. Accounting teacher, fitness enthusiast, blogger, reader.

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31 thoughts on “My Love/Hate Relationship with OmniCrosswords”

  1. it’s like those squishy toys, when you squish one part, all the goo goes to the other side, and so on. time magically fills itself somehow. I’m not comparing you to a squishy toy, mind you. there is only so much time in a day, and the day doesn’t care how busy we’ve been, it keeps on ticking away -)

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  3. As any good crossword puzzler knows, that clue should be 7,4,4 🤣

    I do quite a few puzzles each day, in the vague hope they will prevent my brain from atrophying. My regular newspaper – the i paper – has quite a lot of them: I subscribe to the digital edition so I can vouch for your thoughts about the ability to check your progress. I’ve also taken up a one year subscription to the NYT Games app at a much reduced rate. I already did Wordle and it’s fun trying some of the others. But no way would I pay for Apple News+ even for their few puzzles: I can get all of the magazines I need with Readly, which is much cheaper than Apple, far less US-centric and with a huge selection.

    They are fun, though, aren’t they 😊

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    1. I was trying to make my puzzle a little more challenging by just saying 15 letters 🙂

      I think I’ve tried Readly before, and something made me stop using it. I’ll have to go back and check it again.

      and what’s wrong with being U.S. centric? 🙂

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      1. I saw through your clever little ruse!

        Readly has thousands of magazines and some newspapers. I get Rolling Stone and Billboard from it, amongst many others on music, sports, movies, computing, and current affairs. It gives a much wider choice than Apple News+

        Nothing wrong with being US-centric if you’re American. I just don’t see any point in paying a subscription which has a whole string of newspapers I’ve never heard of and to which I have no connection. I’m sure it works for many, but not for me – I’ll stick with the free version!

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      3. As far as I can tell the British ones are The Times, which I can get free with their app, and The Telegraph, which claims to be upmarket but is just a very biased right wing rag. Many of its publications are also on Readly, so Apple News is highly unlikely ever to get my money!

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      5. The Guardian isn’t on Apple News+ here, just the two I mentioned. But it is on Readly, which thereby scores another point with me 😊

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  5. My crossword puzzle level is the one in AARP Magazine. I could handle the People Magazine one but I don’t want to subscribe. I have trouble doing Xwords in the Church Bulletin which demand so much Biblical knowledge. And they are designed for children. I am puzzled by my lack of crossword puzzling skills because I have always felt like I was really smart.

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  7. That’s why I gave up the app Words With Friends… I was spending too much time on it. My best friend said she gave it up “because it was cutting into my reading time.” And I realized I should do the same.

    The app makers do that on purpose! Our time is their money.

    Now it’s Spelling Bee… fun because my puzzle is synched to my son’s iPad … but there is a lag time, so after I give up he can cheat and look up the rest of the answers on my phone and move us from Amazing or Genius to “Queen Bee” …

    Mommy missed! ” he says proudly as he shows me all the extra words he found to get a perfect score.

    But truthfully, I miss the Words With Friends App because I was playing Scrabble against my real-life friends. I’d go back to it, but then I’d suck away even more time and I feel, at 65, time is running out!

    But crossword puzzles are good for your brain. Maybe just the NYTimes… it’s right there on my Spelling Bee App.

    I feel like I’m repeating myself with this comment… wasn’t there a different app you found addictive years ago? It’s always something! I wasted too much time on Twitter, but fortunately Elon ruined it and that made it easy to just sign off. I still check it occasionally but every time I do, I’m glad I quit. Too many lies/disinformation/trolls over there.

    Meanwhile. Glad your blog is back! NOT a waste of time 🙂 but a nice point of connection.

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    1. Hi Susan! As always, I appreciate your thoughtful comments.

      I don’t think I’ve tried Spelling Bee, but it sounds like my kind of app. That’s funny about your son wanting to outdo you 🙂

      For a while I was obsessed with tweetingout my favorite Wall Street Journal stories each day, but that was quite time-consuming. Like you, I used to enjoy Twitter, these days, not so much. It’s painful to see what people post there, especially Musk.

      Well I guess the pressure is off with trying to blog everyday, since I missed yesterday, and it will likely be sporadic for the next couple of days as we are leaving for Australia later today and then we will be there for a couple of months. We (my wife and youngest son) are excited about the opportunity.

      Have a great day…

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