Hazel
Jigsaw puzzles cut from scratch
Hazel turns your photos, or paintings from its small public-domain gallery, into jigsaw puzzles on iPhone and iPad. Every puzzle is cut fresh, so no two pieces are alike.
The gallery has fifty paintings, mostly from the Impressionists to the early twentieth century: Monet, Homer, Van Gogh, Klimt, Sargent, and some painters you might not know yet. They come from six museums that share their scans freely: the National Gallery of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Met, the Belvedere in Vienna, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The scans are sharp enough to zoom right in, so you can see the weave of the canvas and the ridges in the paint. Each painting comes with its title, artist, date, and a few words about it.
The pieces
Every cut comes from an algorithm I wrote, and I wanted it to look like something a person could have cut by hand. The lines wander a little instead of running dead straight. The knobs each get their own shape and lean, but they stay about the same size across the puzzle, the way they would if one tool had cut them all.
Where cuts meet, they're slightly offset instead of forming a neat plus sign, the way a hand-guided saw would leave them. You might never notice it, but I had a lot of fun figuring it out.
That's a real cut from the app. I asked for 64 pieces and got 63, because Hazel picks whichever layout gives the squarest pieces near the number you ask for.
Each piece is shaded around its rim, like the pressed edge of a cardboard piece, so the board looks like pieces lying on a table. Pieces click softly when they join, and a big section lands heavier than a single piece. The sound stays in the background: the silent switch mutes it, and it won't pause your music or podcast. On iPhone, you also feel a small tap when a piece joins.
You can watch it happen
When you make a puzzle, you get to watch it being cut. A plain grid appears, the lines drift a little, knobs push out one by one, and the crossings shift into their offsets. Then the picture is in pieces.
A fresh install has no puzzles in it, so the first one you solve is one you watched get cut.
Work however you want
Nothing on the board tells you what to do next. Pieces stay wherever you put them, and pieces you've joined move together. Sort by color, start with the border, or begin with the part you like best. The finished picture is a tap away, like the lid of the box.
There's no score and no clock. Leave a puzzle for a month and it'll be just as you left it.
Before you start, you choose how many pieces, whether they can be rotated, and how close a piece has to be before it snaps into place. Three presets go from 24 to 96 pieces, or you can set each one yourself, up to 300.
What's not in it
Hazel is free. No ads, timers, or account. It works without an internet connection, and your photos never leave your device. Nothing to buy.
I hope you like it!