Beta 20

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 20 is now available from our Beta Program page.

What's Not Fixed

There are still a couple of crashing bugs left. Unfortunately I have not been able to reproduce any of them on my own machines yet. If I can't make it happen where I can study it, I probably can't fix it. But I haven't given up yet, and I intend to focus on these issues in the coming week.

There is only one currently-unfixed bug in the public Bug List: Bug ID 82. It's a cosmetic problem that happens only on older systems, and it seems to be an Apple bug. So far I haven't found a workaround for it, but I'll keep after it.

What's Fixed

Bugs 83, 93, and 94 are now fixed. But in addition to the bugs in the public Bug List, I have kept a private, unnumbered list of problems that you testers have mostly not noticed.

A lot of these unnumbered bugs are minor and/or cosmetic issues: it wouldn't be the end of the world if they weren't fixed. But I want Solitaire Till Dawn to be as smooth an experience as possible, so for b20 I put some time in on these little issues. I won't list all the changes here; there's a full list in the Read Me file for b20. Here are a few of the more important and/or noticeable ones:

Baker's Game: Many of you reported that Baker's Game gives a lot of false you-are-stuck notifications. That's fixed; I'm pretty sure now that if Baker's Game thinks you're stuck, you really are.

Readability: In response to quite a few requests, the numbers on the deck are now larger and easier to read.

Timed Games: Your "average time" in the All Statistics window was being calculated incorrectly, and has been fixed. Games that last longer than an hour now display the time in hours, minutes, and seconds instead of just minutes and seconds.

Animations: Wins are now reported after the winning move has finished animating, instead of instantly when you click the winning card. The fade-out-and-in animation on New Game has been improved, and should look more smooth now. Changes in window size are now animated, although I have to say that it isn't too smooth. (This seems to be true for Apple apps as well as for Solitaire Till Dawn, though.) The Game Drawer now slides in and out more smoothly.

Tour: The Solitaire Till Dawn Tour has been reworked. There are a couple of new pages covering preferences and keyboard shortcuts; the images in the Tour window are now larger and more clear; and there are retina versions of all of the images. The Tour window is now located near the upper-right of the game window, to avoid covering or being covered by the All Statistics window, the Game Info panel, or the Game Drawer.

BETA 8

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 8 is now available from our Beta Program page.

I am hoping that this release will finally bring us to a level of reliability and stability for all users. There's still a list of unfixed lesser bugs, but the two big bugs that have been plaguing prior betas should now be fixed.

Bug ID 3 is the one where the game window sometimes doesn't open when you first launch a new beta. We think we understand that now, and we think we have it licked.

Bug ID 24 is the one that drew the suit pips too small for some users. Like bug 3, we thought we had this fixed before and were wrong, but we believe we've got it right this time.

In addition, related bugs 22 and 33 have been fixed. Bug 22 was a problem with The Towers which we fixed in b7, but it wasn't a good fix: it broke other stuff, which became bug 33. We've now fixed 33, and re-fixed 22 in a way that doesn't break anything else. You should now be told when you're stuck (if you have selected that option) correctly in nearly all cases.

Finally, bug 32 was fixed: a minor problem in which selecting Accordion (or whatever game was at the top of the list) in the Game Drawer would not display the Game Info window.

Let us know how this new beta works for you. Thanks!

P.S. There are two days left to respond to the poll, in the right-hand column of this page. Our thanks to everyone who has responded so far!

Beta 7

A quick reminder: If you haven't taken the poll yet, please take a moment to do that. It's along the right-hand side of this page, and it will only take a moment or two. Thanks!

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 7 is now available for download from our Beta Program page.

Here's what ISN'T fixed:
I'm sorry, but there are still a couple of nasty, difficult bugs that I haven't figured out yet. I am aware of them, they have a high priority, and I'm working on them.

Some (maybe all) users on Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) are seeing tiny suit pips on the cards. This is not correct; the pips should be the same size as the digits and the J, Q, K. We thought we had this fixed in b6, but for at least some users, it's still a problem.

Many users report that when they install a new beta and open it for the first time, it doesn't open a game window. For most users, quitting and trying again works fine, and the problem doesn't recur until they download and install another new beta. One user reports that the problem happens every time.

Here's what IS fixed:
We've received a lot of complaints about the text in the status bar being too small to read. In b7 we've increased the default size of that text a bit, and we've added a control to make the text even bigger for those who want it so.

We fixed a passel of bugs that were mostly reported for Grandma's Game, but many of which affected other games as well. These included false-stuck indications, cards that can't be moved by clicking but can be moved by dragging, autoplay misbehaviors, and the oft-reported problem that you can't drag the second-to-bottom card into the bottom position in the workspace fan in Grandma's Game.

Many users also reported that the Game Info panel never lists anything for a game's Family, Categories, or Variants. That's also been fixed. You'll find that in each of these, the entries are links that you can click to find other games in the same category or family, or to see the rules for a variant.

Tiny Suits

If you haven't seen it, BETA 5 is now available from our Beta Page. But there's a problem.

We announced that with b5, the card indices would now be larger and more readable. But we are still getting complaints about them being too small and hard to see. So we asked one of you for a screen shot, and learned something incredibly important: On some systems, the suit symbols look very different from what we intended!

How it looks to some users

How it's supposed to look

We have been using a font to draw the suit symbols. We did some research, and we truly thought that the font we used would be available and the same on all modern Macs. Now we see that that is not true!

We will fix this, we promise you. It's now Bug ID 24. It's a high priority and we'll try to fix it as soon as possible. But it may take a while because we will have to rework the entire mechanism that we use to draw, place, and scale the suit images.


Another thing: b5 was supposed to fix Bug ID 16, so that the game window is always correctly sized and placed. But we missed something, and now when you start a new game, the game window always jumps to the upper-left of your monitor. That was unintended, and we'll fix that too. This new problem is Bug ID 23.

Be patient. With your help, we'll get there!