Beta 17: Bigger Cards

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 17 is now available from our Beta Program page.

What's New

I have been nearly drowned in requests for larger cards and better use of screen space. This release should provide that, in many if not all cases. The significant change is that downward fans are now allowed to extend all the way to the bottom of the window and if necessary, even below the bottom of the window (but never so far that you can't clearly see or click on all the cards).

If that doesn't quite make sense, just try it: download b17, and try selecting a larger card size in each game that you play. That's important: you may not see a change unless you request a larger card size! To ask for larger cards, look at the card size menu (Decor > Card Size) and choose something larger than your current size. I recommend simply asking for the largest size ("Huge"); if that won't fit, Solitaire Till Dawn will give you the largest size that will fit your screen.

That lets Solitaire Till Dawn make better use of vertical space. There is also a small change to the use of horizontal space: I've added about 10 more pixels of horizontal space between the cards and the game drawer tabs on the left side of the window, by popular request. This means that every game will require that much more horizontal space. If you have a game window that is already using the maximum width of your screen, it's possible that this small expansion will mean that the card size you were using will no longer fit, and you will have to use a smaller card size. I think that's unlikely to happen. But if it does, please try selecting a larger card size just to be sure. If that doesn't work and you are still stuck with smaller cards, let me know and tell me which game you were playing and what size screen you have, please.

In addition to the card size changes, b17 includes a fair-sized list of less-obvious improvements and bug fixes which you can read about in the Read Me file that comes with the download.

Known Bugs

I am aware from your bug reports (thank you!) that a crash can occur during normal play. This is now Bug ID 86. Normally I would try to fix such a bug before bringing out a new release, but I want to make b17 available well before b16 expires at the end of May. I will do my best to fix this issue for b18.

Beta 9

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 9 is now available from our Beta Program page.

Although beta 8 cleared up a lot of the launch-and-quit issues, some have lingered. In this release, we hope to make improvements on two serious problems.

Bug ID 39 should now be fixed. This one was preventing Solitaire Till Dawn from quitting when you select the Quit menu item, or press cmd-Q. It happened when the drawer was still open in the game window, and we fixed it by making sure that the drawer gets closed whenever the application tries to quit.

Bug ID 43 was a weird one. Some users reporting always seeing the same saved game, whenever they opened Solitaire Till Dawn, instead of seeing the last game they had played. And that was followed by getting the same series of shuffles in new games, instead of getting an unrepeating sequence of new games. I have to blush about this: you can quit Solitaire Till Dawn by simply closing the game window, but I forgot to make sure that the current game gets saved when you do that! So now I've fixed that, and the problem should not happen again.

I'm still tweaking the card graphics. In this release, the "10" rank is different: it uses a more standard font, and stylistically looks better and more like the other ranks. This should solve Bug ID 37, where some users saw the "10" in a very tiny font.

For the few users who use the Players feature, the My Favorites list is now correctly updated when you switch Players. The Game Info panel displays the game description text correctly in all cases. And finally, users who had custom cardbacks in the old Solitaire Till Dawn were seeing blank cardbacks until they chose a cardback from the ones offered in the Decor panel. Custom cardbacks will not be supported in the first release, but now such users will see a default cardback image instead of a blank one, and will be told why.

Poll Results
Thanks to the well-over-150 people who responded to our poll! The results were interesting, if a bit confusing in places.

The first poll section, The Beta Program, was meant to evaluate how many people were actively participating in the program. Somewhat to my surprise, only a bit more than 2/3 of the poll respondents answered that they had actually downloaded and used any of the beta releases.

That initial result has an effect on how we interpret the rest of the questions. If only 2/3 of the respondents have actually used the beta, then we must assume that only 2/3 of the answers to the rest of the questions are really relevant. The rest are either answering about their experience with the old version of Solitaire Till Dawn (our fault: we should have made it more clear that we wanted answers about the beta versions only), or else they just like taking polls.

But it doesn't matter very much. We were looking for clear evidence of portions of Solitaire Till Dawn that are hard to understand, and fudging the percentages a bit doesn't make that much difference. Here's what we think we learned:

• Most people can find and use the Preferences window, and the Decor window. That's good.
• Most people can find the built-in Help and use it, though many did not bother to do so.
• Few people took the tour that is offered at first launch, but most of those who did take the tour found it useful.
• Most people seem able to use the Game Browser to read rules.
• Only a few use the Game Browser to find more solitaires that they might like.
• Few users know about the many keyboard shortcuts that Solitaire Till Dawn offers.

That's mostly good news. I would like to increase the number of users who take the Tour, but it may be that most of you beta users already knew about new features like the Game Drawer by reading my pre-beta blog posts.

Not many people are using the Game Browser to find new solitaires; but most people seem to like to play just a few favorites, so perhaps that's natural.

My biggest concern is the keyboard shortcuts. Some of those are very useful, and there are a lot of them. I'd like to make them more visible.

For now, if you're a beta user who hasn't been using the keyboard much, I suggest you open the Help, scroll down to the bottom of the Table of Contents, and click on Keyboard Shortcuts. You might learn something cool!

Beta 5: Readability, Win Notifications, and Window Sizing

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 5 is now available for download from our Beta Program page.

Here's what's new:

Easier to Read Cards
Update: We've learned more about this problem since I wrote the discussion below. See Tiny Suits to find out what we learned. We will fix this problem, we promise.

We have had a lot (and I mean a whole lot) of complaints that the card indices are hard to read. (The card indices are the rank-and-suit at the upper-left corner of a card: 2♠ for example.) Frankly, we were surprised. In a certain sense, the card indices were the same size as in the old version.

But after some thought, I began to understand the problem. Modern monitors have higher resolution (more pixels-per-inch, or "ppi") than the older monitors that the old version of STD ran on. An image that is (say) 72 pixels high was a full inch high on an old monitor, but that same image would be less than 3/4" high on my current monitor.

The obvious solution is to make the card indices bigger, but then that makes a layout take more space on-screen, because you have to spread the cards a little more loosely to see all of the larger indices in a fan or column. A larger layout may mean that you now have to use smaller cards to fit a game onto your screen, which defeats the purpose because smaller cards have, you guessed it, smaller card indices.

But we've done our best. The card indices in b5 are significantly larger, and we've tried to minimize the increase in layout size. We hope you like the result.

Win Notifications
A passel of bugs were found with the "You win" notifications. We think we've fixed them all; you tell us if we missed a spot.

First, the settings in Preferences > Notifications are now honored. If you turn off "Tell Me When I Win", you won't see the alert.

If you turn on "Show my statistics when I win" the All Statistics window will appear when you win, even if you've turned off "Tell Me When I Win".

In the All Statistics window, selecting "Start New Game After Win" now immediately changes the "Done" button to "New Game", and vice-versa. Clicking "Done" makes the window go away. Clicking "New Game" actually starts a new game.

Window Sizing
Solitaire Till Dawn is supposed to remember your window size and placement, on a per-game basis; and now in b5, it actually does. If you've never played a particular kind of solitaire before, it will show you a window with the largest card size that will fit on your screen; but after that, it will remember any change you make to window size and placement, and go back to it whenever you start up or switch to that game.

We also added a checkmark to the Card Sizes menu item that shows your current card size.

Summing Up
In this release we have again tried to address the most urgent issues that seem to be on your minds. As always, please let us know whether the results are pleasing and working as expected.

Your reports continue to be immensely valuable to us. Thanks, and keep up the good work!

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♣.

A Little Atmosphere

Just a quick progress report: Since my last post, I've finished up the animation bug fixes I was working on, and I'm now doing a little decorating: think of it as turning Solitaire Till Dawn into a place with "a little atmosphere."

Much of this work has actually been done for a long time: selecting cardbacks, royalty images, and window backgrounds is all already working. But the user interface for the Decor window, where you can select these things, was clunky and hard to use. I spent some time on it, and I think it's better now.

By the way, there's one feature from old Solitaire Till Dawn that won't be in the next release: you won't be able to create cardbacks using your own photos. I'm sure people will want that, and it will appear in a later release. But right now I'm focussed on getting a usable release out the door and into your hands, and custom cardbacks would take too much time to implement. (You will be able to use your own photos for the window background; that's already working. Cardbacks are harder because they're small, so you'll want a nice user interface to scale and crop your image so that it fits nicely: that's the hard part.)

I am now adding the old sound effects to the new release. This is another feature I might have skipped if it would have taken very long to do, but Cocoa makes it dead simple. I've spent just part of today on it, and I'm nearly done already.

Update October 11 2013: I am retaining compatibility with Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8). Everybody who wants the new version but doesn't want to upgrade to Lion or Mountain Lion, y'all can relax. And thanks for the feedback!

Here's a chance for you to make yourself heard: I am now inclined to make this new version require at least Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) or later. I was going to make it compatible with the older Snow Leopard (10.6) as well, but there are some niceties in Lion that I'd like to take advantage of. The old Solitaire Till Dawn will run in Snow Leopard if you hand-install Rosetta (which is free from Apple), and Lion is now nearly three years old, so I think requiring at-least-Lion is not unreasonable. If you are still running Snow Leopard and you desperately want the new release to work on your current system, please leave a comment here. No promises, but I'll be listening. (If you are not using Snow Leopard, please do not respond. I assume that nearly everyone following this blog is using at-least-Lion, and I only need to hear from the exceptions. Thanks!)