Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Mouseless

I've been silent for a while; this was due to "life intervening." The holidays, the circus of trying to sell and buy and move house, and some other issues have been claiming my time and attention. I'm still pretty busy in ways that preclude daily work on Solitaire Till Dawn, but things are starting to calm down and I have gotten a bit done in the last few days.

I've been working on a new feature: "mostly mouseless" play. You can already hold down the Shift key to highlight all movable cards, to see what your options are. With the new feature, you can use the arrow keys to select any one of the movable cards; then just pressing the Return key acts as if you had clicked the card, sending it to a default legal destination. If you haven't made a selection yet, pressing Return will act on the first movable card, which is a handy shortcut when there's only one movable card or you're sure the one you want to move would be the first one.

That bit about "a default legal destination": that's what makes this only mostly mouseless. There's no keyboard-driven way to choose among multiple destinations, so you may still have to reach for the mouse once in a while if the card you want to move doesn't go where you want it to go. I might address this some day, but perhaps not right away.

I need to spend a bit more time on the screen display (showing which card is currently selected), but the feature itself is in and working just fine.