Monday, February 23, 2015

News, and Tips: Play by Keyboard

We haven't posted for a while, but we haven't vanished! Here's a little news for you, followed by the first in a series of "Tips" for getting more fun out of Solitaire Till Dawn.

News

Solitaire Till Dawn has been in the App Store for nearly four months now, and it's doing well. (It could always do better—tell your friends!) We now have 70 ratings, all but three of which are a full 5 stars. (If you like Solitaire Till Dawn, please help us out by rating it in the App Store—thanks!) And our support email has been minimal, and mostly concerned with App Store issues; no big bugs have been found since the release, which is great!

So what's next? We have an upgrade in the works. The upgrade will be free if you've already purchased Solitaire Till Dawn through the App Store. It will bring back the popular Magnetic Mouse feature, and the ability to create custom cardback images from your own photos. There will be a new feature too, one that should please some of the hard-core players out there. We don't have a schedule for the release yet, sorry.

What about iPad? That's in the works too, but (sorry!) it's still a long way off. We have barely started on that project.

Tips: Play by Keyboard

We intend to post some tips, from time to time, highlighting features of Solitaire Till Dawn that you may not know about, or showing off some of the more obscure yet interesting games. You can look for these articles by searching for the Tips tag.

In this, our first Tips article, we'd like to tell you about playing without using the mouse. Mice are great, but sometimes it's easier and faster to just type, and Solitaire Till Dawn will (mostly) let you do that.

Selecting an Available Card
Whenever you can make a legal move (other than dealing from the deck), there are one or more cards that you can pick up. Although it usually doesn't show, one of them is always the "selected" card. Pressing the Return key has the same effect as clicking that card: it will fly off to one of its legal destinations.

If there's more than one card that can be moved, you can change which one is selected. Press either the left or right arrow key and you'll see a yellow oval appear over one of the available cards. The oval shows that that card is selected, and it is the one that will move if you press Return. Keep pressing the left or right arrow keys, and the selection will change: the yellow oval will move to another available card with each press. When you've selected the card you want, press Return to move it.

The yellow oval doesn't stop you from using the mouse. Make any move you like, and the yellow oval will disappear until you press one of the arrow keys again.

Multiple Destinations
What if the card could go to more than one destination, and doesn't go to the one you want? Sorry, at this time you have to hit Undo and then use the mouse to drag the card to your desired destination. We hope to address this problem in a future release.

Dealing
You can deal by pressing D, or by pressing the Tab key.

Undo and Redo
Press Escape (ESC) to undo, and press the Space Bar to redo.

There! Now you can play most games without reaching for the mouse. Enjoy!