Beta 24

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 24 is now available from our Beta Program page.

Crashes and Freezes—Please Read!

For the past few months Solitaire Till Dawn has mostly seemed solid and stable, with one big exception: every so often, somebody will experience an unexpected crash in the middle of playing an otherwise-ordinary game. I know from your detailed reports (thank you!) that this is a real problem; but I've been seriously hampered by the fact that I have never seen this crash on my own systems.

Some of you have told me that you can reliably produce the crash by some procedure on one of your systems, but every person who has told me this has a different way of making it happen! And no matter how carefully I reproduce your setup and follow your instructions, the crash never happens on my own machines. This all makes it very difficult for me to figure out what's wrong, and impossible for me to be certain (from my own testing) to know if any change I make has helped.

But I have been working on it anyway, and I may have made some progress. This b24 release contains some changes that I believe fix a real problem, one that might result in the kind of crashes and freezes that some of you have seen. But I can't know for sure until you folks have run it through its paces. So:

If you've seen crashes or freezes recently, please try to make them happen with b24. If you find that you no longer see the problem, please let me know! And of course, if you do experience new crashes, please send me the crash report as usual. This is the last important bug to fix before we can ship the product! I really want this fixed, and you can help.

Other Changes in b24

Rank Highlighting: Press (for example) 'j' to highlight all the Jacks; if you then move a Jack, the highlighting on that Jack would disappear, although all other Jacks would remain highlighted. In b24, the moved card retains its highlighting.

Game List Scrolling is improved, especially on Lion and Snow Leopard where it has been very jerky and flickery.

The Game Info Panel now always appears (after the usual half-second delay) whenever the selected game is visible in the game list.

Play Game Number: This dialog did not work under Snow Leopard; now it does.

Rouge et Noir: The 'Deal' command will now move a card from the stock to the discard pile, if the stock is not empty. If the stock is empty, dealing will recycle the discards as before.

Beta Notice: In the panel that appears at startup to show the expiration date, there is now a button labeled "Check for Updates". Clicking that button will open the Beta Program page on this web site, where you can see whether a later beta version is available, and download it if so. This feature is a bit late in coming, since we are hoping that we are nearly done with the beta program! But we have promised to keep a usable beta available to you all until the final product is available from the App Store, and until then this button should be helpful.

Why It's Difficult

Just for fun: Today's XKCD comic doesn't really explain why some of the things you'd like me to do are difficult, but it at least recognizes the problem:

Beta 21

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 21 is now available for download from our Beta Program page.

Snow Leopard Fix
This release is a quick fix for a show-stopper bug under Snow Leopard. In yesterday's b20 release any attempt to start a new game would result in a blank window.

Beta 20
The b20 version was released only yesterday If you missed it, see the Beta 20 blog post for a description of what was fixed, and what important bugs remain to be fixed.

Crashing Bugs
We know that there are still one or two crashing bugs left to fix. They are rare, but all crashes are important and we're eager to fix these problems. The trouble is, we don't know how to cause them! We know that some of you are seeing these crashes, but we can't make them happen on our own machines, and that makes it difficult to diagnose and fix the problem.

One of you has said that dragging a card too far to the left, outside of the actual game window, will cause a crash. We tried it, on each of our systems, multiple times and in different ways; but we never saw a crash.

Another report suggested that a quick right-click, then left-click with the mouse would cause a crash. Again, we have tried it and have not seen any crashes.

Any information that any of you can provide about these crashes will be most welcome. Thanks!

Beta 16

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 16 is now available from our Beta Program page.

This release contains some important improvements, along with a list of smaller stuff, as follows:

Snow Leopard Again

With beta 15 I thought I had restored Snow Leopard compatibility, but a lot of you still had serious problems. I've been able to reproduce and study those problems, and I think I have them fixed. Snow Leopard users, please try b15 and let me know how it goes. I wouldn't be surprised if you found some small bugs (I found and fixed a few already) but you should now be able to actually play solitaire again!

"Skip Long Animations" is back

In fact, it's better than before. The Miscellaneous tab in the Preferences window now lets you choose from three levels of animation: Show all animations, Skip long animations, and Skip more animations. The third option not only skips the longer animations when you deal, it also suppresses the "riffle" effect when you're dealing in games like Klondike and Canfield.

Bug 77: Responsiveness

Some games were kind of sluggish in some ways. TriPeaks was one example: after dealing a new card, it was noticeably slow in updating the available-card highlighting. Beta 16 should now be properly responsive.

Bug 76 and 78: Status Bar Stuff

Resizing the status bar tended to make fields overlap, cut them short, and make the font-size buttons stop working correctly. This should now all be fixed. 

Bugs 22, 81, 84: Detecting stuck games, and early wins

The games The Towers and Manx should no longer tell you you're stuck in certain situations when you really aren't stuck. And a long list of games (see the Read Me file in the b16 download for the list) should now correctly report early wins in more situations.

As always, please download, try it out, and let me know how it goes! And remember: when you send me a bug report, please mention which version of Solitaire Till Dawn you are using, and which version of Mac OS X you are running. Thanks!

I need help with Snow Leopard!

Thanks, gang! I think I've got this one licked now. I won't need any more reports like these.

I have a Snow Leopard (that is, Mac OS X 10.6.8) machine which I use for testing Solitaire Till Dawn. The latest release, b15, works fine on that machine. But I have email from a number of you saying that it is not working on your own Snow Leopard machines.

If you have Snow Leopard, I would be very grateful if you would do these things for me:

1. Make sure you have the b15 version. (If not, download it here.)
2. Try to run it; see whether it works or not.
3. Select About This Mac from the Apple menu, and look at the line labeled "Processor".
4. Send me a message: tell what your processor is, and whether or not Solitaire Till Dawn works on that machine.

You don't have to be in Solitaire Till Dawn when you select About This Mac. As an example, on my own machine the About This Mac display says:

Processor   2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

The usual failure behavior seems to be that two windows open instead of just one. One of them is blank; the other shows a game layout. Both windows show the beta disclaimer. Neither window allows you to play solitaire. If you are seeing a different kind of failure, please also tell me about that.

I'd really like to get this fixed. But it's hard to fix a bug if it won't actually fail when I'm watching it; and on my machine, it doesn't fail. So any information you can send will be useful.

Thanks!

Beta 15

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 15 is now available from our Beta Program page.

This release fixes bugs 52, 65, 68, and 79. Not many bugs fixed, but they are important ones:

Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8)

At long last, we have restored compatibility with Snow Leopard. Beta 15 should work on Snow Leopard machines (along with all later versions of Mac OS X), and we're looking forward to hearing from those of you who have Snow Leopard to test on. Update: Some users are still having problems. We think this is due to old data from earlier versions, and we are looking into it.

Concurrency Issues

I've ranted about concurrent programming in the past, and more than once I've thought I had all those problems fixed; but they have kept coming back. Now, once again, I think I have them all fixed, and maybe I'll be right this time. This was bug 79 that caused problems with Accordion, but it could affect other games as well. We also fixed an un-numbered bug that caused crashes with rapid undo and redo (as opposed to Undo All and Redo All).

Empty Foundations

Another recurring bug (so often that I mistakenly gave this bug two numbers, 52 and 68) caused empty foundation piles to be slow in showing the ranks that could be played there. Again, I am hoping that this is finally fixed for good and all.

What's Next?

Oh, lots of things. I am hoping that I am now down to a list of relatively minor issues: worth fixing, but not as awful or urgent as the crashing bugs we've all been chasing for so long. Solitaire Till Dawn isn't done yet, but I hope that b15 will be a big step toward real stability.

End of Hiatus

Although I did resume responding to bug reports and email last week as promised, I haven't been able to get too much else done since then. We had family visiting, a joyous but time-consuming week-long event that was followed by crashing hard and catching up on lost sleep this past weekend.

But now it's Monday, and this quick post is to let you know that I am back at work. A few details:

That Blank Card
Many, many users have reported seeing a blank white card that won't go away. Thanks for those reports, all of you, but I don't need any more of them. This is Bug 73 in our Bug List, and we will get it fixed sometime soon.

Crashes in b14
We think we know what's causing the remaining crashes, and we think we know how to fix it. It's a bit delicate so it might take a couple of days to get it right. Hopefully b15 will have the fix.

Snow Leopard Support
We've made progress, and we haven't given up. But we had hoped that we'd be able to make b15 the "Snow Leopard" build, and really get it solved; instead we've found that b14 still has a few important problems that can affect all users. So b15, when it appears, may concentrate on those issues instead; and if so, perhaps b16 will become the "Snow Leopard build".

As always, thanks for your support and your patience! We're working hard for you.

Hiatus, and Progress Report

In case you missed it, we released Beta 14 a few days ago. It is available for download from our Beta Program page. Your reports so far indicate that it is much more stable than b13 or b12.

I am working now on b15, in which I hope to restore compatibility with Snow Leopard. I have it basically working now, but it's still pretty fragile.

I may not be responding to bug reports and email until next week. Some visiting family and other festivities will be enforcing a little time off from solitaire work. Keep sending your reports, I love 'em and I want 'em; but don't be worried if I don't respond for a few days. I'll start catching up on Monday the 24th.

See you then!

Beta 14

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 14 is now available from our Beta Program page.

This release fixes bugs 71, 72, 74, and 75. We do not expect any crashes in this release! Of course, we've said that before and been wrong before, but the previous release (b13) has only been seen to crash in certain circumstances, and we think b14 will fix that. If you do see a crash with b14, please send us the crash report.

In addition, we've learned that many of you like to undo and redo by (for example) holding down the ESC or Space bar keys, and letting them auto-repeat. This turned out to create problems that didn't happen when using the toolbar buttons Undo to Snapshot and Redo to Snapshot. We think we've fixed those, too, except that the animation may be jerky when you do that.

Osmosis and Peek were triggering an obscure bug that made Undo fail (no matter how you used it), and we've fixed that too.

We still have not restored compatibility with Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8). I will work on that for the next release. We (and some of you) have also noticed that some games are not very responsive, with a perceptible lag in highlighting available cards or in moving a clicked card. We'll be working on that, too.

A Reminder
Please tell us which beta you are using when you send a bug report! If you report a crash and don't tell me which beta, I don't know whether it's a crash in b14 (which would be important news) or a crash in b12 (which would be a bug I've probably fixed already).

The minimum info we like to see in a bug report is:

• Version of Solitaire Till Dawn (e.g. "b14")
• Version of Mac OS X
• Game you were playing (e.g. "Free Cell")
• What you were doing when the bug happened (e.g. clicking the "Undo" button)
• What you expected to see happen
• What happened instead that looked like a bug

Here's an example:

I was using b14 on Mavericks. I was playing Free Cell. I'd just won a game, and while the cards were still flying up to the foundations, I clicked the "New Game" button. I expected to get a new game of Free Cell, but instead Solitaire Till Dawn crashed.

That's a pretty useful bug report: it has all the important basic info, and a fair amount of detail. If you do see a crash, we also love to get the contents of the crash report that will appear on your screen (but don't bother clicking the "Send to Apple" bug, they'll ignore it).

If you see something peculiar on the screen that isn't a crash, sending a screen shot may be helpful. You can't send attachments or images through the Bug Report Form, but if you tell us you've got a screen shot, we'll write back and tell you how to send it to us.

Thanks!

BETA 13: No Crashes (we hope)

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 13 is now available from our Beta Program page.

Important: Some of b12's problems can persist in a saved game. We recommend starting a new game the first time you open b13, instead of trying to play the saved game from b12. Otherwise you may still see crashing or incorrect behavior, even when using b13.

What's New
As you all must know by now, the previous release b12 had serious crashing bugs that affected nearly all users. We believe that b13 will be much more stable. In addition, we believe we have fixed the problem of inappropriately face down cards that many users saw on Lion.

Some of you have reported seeing the same shuffles over and over in b12. This is a side effect of the crashes: if Solitaire Till Dawn does not quit properly, it can't save any information about which shuffles you have already played. If it doesn't crash, you shouldn't see repeated games.

Finally, we have made some subtle adjustments to the pacing of the animations; we hope that this will make them more attractive, and even perhaps more informative by making it more obvious what happens when you deal in some games.

Update: Some of you have found that there are still cases where cards are incorrectly face down, and a few of you have experienced crashes. The face down cards seem to happen when rapidly undoing or redoing, either by repeatedly clicking the Undo or Redo buttons or by repeatedly using their keyboard shortcuts. It doesn't seem to happen if you just click Undo to Snapshot or Redo to Snapshot. The face down cards still work as if they were face up; and you can get them to show correctly by changing the card size (after which you can change it back to the size you were using before).

Update: Also, I have learned that you can cause a crash pretty easily if you click the "New Game" button before your current game is quite through moving cards around. To avoid this crash, always wait a second or so after all the cards have stopped moving before trying to start a new game.

Testing
We tested this release, a lot. So why am I so carefully saying "we believe we have fixed it" instead of just "we fixed it"?

Most of the crashes and face down cards in b12 were due to race conditions in concurrent code. We know that many of you won't know what that buzz phrase means; that's okay. The important thing is that this kind of problem does not always behave exactly the same way every time, nor on every machine, nor under every version of Mac OS X. It can also behave differently simply because one is trying to debug it (the dreaded heisenbug).

As you can imagine, this can make it very difficult to be certain that a problem is really fixed. So while we have done a lot of testing of different games on different Macs with different versions of OS X, all we can really say for sure is that we haven't seen b13 crash or seriously screw up the graphics yet. To be certain (of either success or failure), we need you guys on your hundreds of different Macs, playing hundreds of different games. If you see a problem, do as you've been doing: tell us about it! And if you haven't seen any problems after using b13 for a few days, tell us that too!

What Isn't New
This release still will not run successfully on Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8). We intend to try to restore Snow Leopard compatibility in a later release, but for now it was important to fix the serious problems that everyone was seeing, regardless of which OS they use.

A word about bug reports
Recently we've been telling you not to send us any more crash reports for b12, because we already had more than we needed. But now that's over: for b13, we want every crash report you see, thanks!

I'd like to remind you all that when you send us a bug report, please include at least the following information:

• The beta version you were using
• The version of Mac OS X you were using
• The game you were playing (Klondike Familiar, Free Cell, Canfield, or whatever)
• A careful description of what happened and why you think it was wrong.

You cannot send file attachments using the Bug Report form. If you need to send us an attachment (such as a screen shot), you can send us a description of the problem and mention that you have additional files to send. We'll reply and tell you how to send them to us.

If you experience a crash, your Mac will display a crash report for you, and ask whether to send it to Apple. Here's what to do:

• Don't send it to Apple. They can't do anything about it, and they will ignore it.
• Do copy all the text from the window, paste it into out Bug Report form, and send it to us.

Thanks!

Beta 13 Progress

In my last post, I said that I wanted to delay releasing beta 13 until it felt really solid and stable: that is, I want it to really work again. It was working well before I rewrote all the animation code; I want to get back to that point.

And I'm close, now. I believe I've got all of b12's nasty crashing bugs fixed (although I'm still testing to try to be more certain). I have the big face-down-cards bug that Lion users have been seeing pretty much fixed, too. And I have been working hard on putting more polish on the animations, especially the timing so that everything will seem to move smoothly, neither too fast nor too slow.

Before I send a beta out to all of you, I usually try to test it myself. The last couple of betas didn't get much testing, for reasons I won't rehash, and the result is what you've seen: lots of serious bugs that I should have found and fixed before you ever saw them. For b13, I have time to be much more careful about my testing, and that is what I'm working on now.

But testing takes time. You are running systems that vary all the way from Snow Leopard to Mavericks: that covers four different major releases of the Mac OS. Solitaire Till Dawn behaves differently on every one of them. So multiply 100 games times 4 Mac OS versions times several plays per game, and you can get a sense of how much testing I have to do to even pretend that I'm being thorough.

I had hoped to get b13 out very soon, perhaps even this evening; it has been running very well on my Mountain Lion system that I use for development. I had hoped that it would run equally well on Lion and Mavericks, but I am testing first to make sure. And guess what: I've found bugs that show up in Lion but not in Mountain Lion or Mavericks, and I've found bugs that show up in Mavericks but not in Mountain Lion or Snow Leopard!

I found those bugs just a little while ago, today. I will spend tomorrow working on them and see what kind of progress I can make. They aren't killer bugs: mainly they are fairly rare occasions when cards show up face down instead of face up like they should. I know I said I had that one fixed, and I mostly have: the bug is now rare instead of common. But "rare" isn't good enough, of course. With a little luck I can get them fixed in just a day or two. If I can't, I will put out b13 anyway, since it is a huge improvement over b12; so either way you won't have to wait too long.

In the meantime, please don't send me any more bug reports about b12. I already know it's very buggy and crashy. I already have far more crash reports than I need or can use. Wait for the next beta, please, and then you can start sending me reports again. Right now they'd just be wasting your time and mine. Thanks!

A quick word about Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6): beta 13, like beta 12, will have serious problems on Snow Leopard. I know about them, I intend to fix them, but not in this release. Maintaining compatibility with Snow Leopard is quite difficult, and most of you aren't using it. I need to get a stable release out for the majority, and I need to do it fairly quickly, so Snow Leopard will have to wait.

Beta 12: Returning to Stability

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 12 is now available from our Beta Program page.

This release is valid through the end of March.

Once again, we are releasing a beta in a certain amount of haste, because the previous beta will expire in just a day or two. We had hoped for beta 12 to be really solid, and to fix more of the "small bugs" that don't cause crashes. And we do think this release is a big improvement, with a long list of bug fixes since beta 11.

But it's not perfect. We have seen one crash while using Undo to Snapshot to rewind a long game of Forty Thieves back to the start. We're sure it can happen with other games as well. But it seems to be difficult to reproduce, because we've had no problems doing the same thing with other games of Forty Thieves, and in other solitaires, in repeated tests. We do have a notion of what the problem is, and we will be working on it.

Also, we apologize to all of you who are running Snow Leopard, but beta 12 is broken on Snow Leopard (10.6.8) just like b11 and b10 were. We do intend to address this issue and restore compatibility with Snow Leopard, but we didn't have time to do this for beta 12.

In addition to fixing a large number of bugs from the Bug List, we put a fair amount of work into improving some of the animations in b12. Those of you who complained about the odd "twisting" effect when dealing in Klondike and related games should see a more normal-looking animation in b12. We have also adjusted some of the timing, to make sequences of animations (such as refilling the deck and then dealing a new packet from the deck onto the discard in Klondike) more clear.

We are painfully aware that the animation improvements we introduced in b10 have seriously impacted the stability of Solitaire Till Dawn. Betas 10 and 11 were not really "beta-quality" releases, because there were enough problems to seriously violate the beta rule of "mostly working, most of the time". And b12 still does not have that quality for Snow Leopard. But we're working hard to get that reliability, robustness, and stability back.

Stay tuned, and as always, thanks for your patience, your hard work on our behalf, and your support!

Almost March

It's nearly the end of February, and b11 will expire in a couple of days. I'm starting to get worried emails from some of you.

Relax: I should have b12 out in a day or so. I had wanted to put more work into it before releasing it, because it is still not as robust as b9 (the last beta before I reworked the animation). But I don't want to reward your patience and hard work by cutting you off completely, so I'll get b12 out in the next day or two, and it will have an expiration date that will at least last through March.

The server problems we've had have continued to plague us. The server is up and running now, but we are still getting it tweaked, bringing new services online, and most importantly, documenting everything we had to do to get it running. That's in case we ever have to go through this again!

Because of this, I still haven't been able to spend as much time on solitaire development as I'd like. But I am back at work on it. If you check the Bug List, you'll see that quite a few bugs are marked as "fixed in b12". This next release won't be perfect, but it should be a big improvement.

But not for Snow Leopard. Beta 11 has serious problems on OS X 10.6.8, and I have not had time to address them for b12. I have not given up on Snow Leopard compatibility, but I'm afraid it's not there yet and I won't have time to fix it before b11 expires. (One problem is that, independently of our server issues, my Snow Leopard test machine has been giving me trouble. I think I've sort of got that under control now, too.)

Watch for the b12 release in the next day or two, and expect it to be better than b11 but not perfect.

Beta 2: Lion and Snow Leopard Compatibility

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 2 is now available for download.

This release should fix the serious compatibility problems with OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion) that were seen in the b1 release. These were bugs ID 1 and 2 in our Bug List.

We also know more now about bug ID 3, where some users never see a game window, and instead only get a menu bar with nearly all of its menu items disabled. This is a conflict between Apple's "Gatekeeper" feature and software downloaded from the Internet instead of from the App Store. Update: The workaround that we originally suggested for this problem is not helping. Currently we have no solution, but it's our highest priority and we're working on it.

To get the b2 release, visit our Beta Page.

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.

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!)