Thursday, October 24, 2013

You've Gotta Have Art...

I sent off a couple of requests for artwork quotes today. I can't release Solitaire Till Dawn without at least a new icon, simply because the old one is too small for the App Store: they insist on big, high-resolution icons. I am hoping that it won't take more than two or three weeks for that to be done, as it's a pretty simple job.

We've also requested a quote for some new card art. That will take longer I'm sure, and I have no idea how much it might cost: maybe more than I can afford at this point. But even if we commission new card art, we won't let it delay the release significantly. We can always add it as an update later, if it's not ready for the initial release.

Other progress: the Help pages are essentially done now, although I still need to add a couple of the "special" pages, like "What's New" and "Frequently Asked Questions".

Also I have completed the reveal-overlapped-cards feature. Veterans of Solitaire Till Dawn know that, in some games, a fan of cards can get way too long to fit normally in the window. When that happens, the fan will automatically compress, that is, squeeze the cards more closely together until they fit. But if they squeeze too much, then you can't read what the squeezed cards are any more, and that's not fair.

The old Solitaire Till Dawn had a feature that let you ⌘-click on cards to let you peek at them when they're tightly-squeezed like that. I've now added this feature into the new version, too. It looks a little different than it used to. Here's a small screen shot:

⌘-clicking this black 2 reveals that it is a 2♣.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Snow Leopard It Is

A quick update: In my last post, I asked whether anyone would be upset if the new release required Lion (Max OS X 10.7) or later. I received several responses from users on Snow Leopard (10.6) who were hoping to be able to use the new Solitaire Till Dawn. I hear you, and I am keeping as much backward compatibility as I can reasonably manage. The new release will be compatible with Snow Leopard (10.6.8) or later; and of course "later" includes Lion, Mountain Lion, and the soon-to-be-released Mavericks.