Solitaire Till Dawn for iPad

It's done! It's released!

Solitaire Till Dawn for iPad is now available in the iTunes App Store!

Please note: Sometimes it takes the App Store a while to make sure that everyone can see a new or updated product. If you can't find Solitaire Till Dawn in your App Store right away, please be patient and try again later, or tomorrow.

Tell me more, please...

Solitaire Till Dawn for iPad is free. You can install and use it without paying a cent. But if you do, you'll have to put up with some advertising, and you won't be able to access all the games and features. You can get rid of the ads, gain access to all the games, and use all the features by making inexpensive in-app purchases.

Ad-Free Solitaire Till Dawn - Purchase this package to turn off the ads in Solitaire Till Dawn, forever.

All Games - Gives access to all 100+ games in Solitaire Till Dawn, the same full collection that's in the macOS version.

Fancy Features - Enables all features in Solitaire Till Dawn, including some new ones designed especially for iPad—check out the Deal Button that you can place anywhere on your screen, and the Gestures that let you undo, redo, play to the goals, find cards, and more, with a quick swipe of your fingers.

Deluxe - This package gives you everything, at a substantial discount over buying the individual items above. (And while we reserve the right to change prices, currently the Deluxe package is significantly cheaper than the macOS version!)

We want to thank you all for your patience. We're a very small company, so projects that would take a larger company months can take years for us. We do all the work: designing user interface, writing code, debugging, making marketing and packaging decisions, doing the books, writing the documentation, and handling the legal paperwork. And we want to do it all right, so we're careful, and that takes time.

But now it's ready. Click here for more info, or click here to go to Solitaire Till Dawn on the iTunes App Store!

Ready for iPad!

It took us a year longer than we expected, but it's finally ready.

Solitaire Till Dawn for iPad will be released on Monday, Sept 11, 2017—although it may be a day or so before you see it in your iTunes App Store. If you don't see it on Monday, please be patient and you will probably see it on Tuesday.

This release will be free. You can install and use it without paying a cent. But if you do, you'll have to put up with some advertising, and you won't be able to access all the games and features. You can get rid of the ads, gain access to all the games, and use all the features by making inexpensive in-app purchases.

Ad-Free Solitaire Till Dawn - Purchase this package to turn off the ads in Solitaire Till Dawn, forever.

All Games - Gives access to all 100+ games in Solitaire Till Dawn, the same full collection that's in the macOS version.

Fancy Features - Enables all features in Solitaire Till Dawn, including some new ones designed especially for iPad—check out the Deal Button that you can place anywhere on your screen, and the Gestures that let you undo, redo, play to the goals, find cards, and more, with a quick swipe of your fingers.

Deluxe - This package gives you everything, at a substantial discount over buying the individual items above. (And while we reserve the right to change prices, currently the Deluxe package is significantly cheaper than the macOS version!)

We want to thank you all for your patience. We're a very small company, so projects that would take a larger company months can take years for us. We do all the work: designing user interface, writing code, debugging, making marketing and packaging decisions, doing the books, writing the documentation, and handling the legal paperwork. And we want to do it all right, so we're careful, and that takes time.

But now it's ready. See you on Monday!

RIP Kagi

We note with sadness the closing of the Kagi online store on August 1, 2016.

We have been selling Solitaire Till Dawn for a long time, over 25 years: the first version was released in 1991. For the first couple of years, anyone wanting to purchase it had to make out a check and send it to us via postal mail. Our few overseas customers would often send cash in their own currency, and usually we would just keep it as a souvenir because the cost and hassle of exchanging it for US currency was not worthwhile.

But then Kagi appeared on the scene. Kagi did two wonderful things for us, and for developers like us. The most important thing was that they acted as an online store for our products, where they would accept payment in cash (from nearly any nation), by check, by money order, or by credit card. This made it much easier for our customers to pay us, and our sales skyrocketed.

In addition, they provided us with a public email address that would auto-forward to our current real email address. This was huge; it meant we could put our Kagi email address in our products, and not worry about any later changes to our actual email address. I used my Kagi address for over two decades. (A couple of years ago I transitioned to using our own email server and domain and finally stopped using my Kagi address.)

But the advent of the Mac App Store was a compelling change in the market. If our sales were through Kagi, then we had to find ways to advertise, ways to distribute our product, and ways to drive customers to the Kagi store. The App Store took care of all that by making our product findable and easily purchasable by every Mac user with an Internet connection, everywhere in the world. The current Solitaire Till Dawn series is available only through the App Store.

But we kept up the Kagi store for the older versions. We know that some of our fans are still using older Macs, and we didn't want to leave them behind.

But now comes the news that Kagi has closed their doors. It's the end of an era, truly, and we are sad to see it.

Unsurprisingly, sales of our legacy apps have not been high. Kagi's closing will not affect our bottom line or our plans for the future. But it does mean that we will no longer be selling those legacy apps to new customers. We are sorry, but without Kagi's invaluable help, it would be more trouble than it is worth for us to try to manually handle new sales of old products.

However, we will not desert our existing legacy customers just yet. You may still download our older apps, including older versions of Solitaire Till Dawn, from our web site—just scroll to the bottom of the page to find the links to older versions. But you will need to have a previously-purchased registration key in order to use the legacy apps.

After a decent period of time, we may decide to simply publish registration keys for those old apps, and allow anyone to use them for free. But out of respect for our recent purchasers of those products (however few they may be) we will not be doing this any time soon.

25 Years!

This month Solitaire Till Dawn celebrates its silver anniversary! We released the first version of Solitaire Till Dawn 25 years ago, in February of 1991.

That's a long time, and it's been a long odyssey. In that quarter-century, we have written Solitaire Till Dawn from the ground up three times: first for Classic Mac OS, then again for OS X up through Snow Leopard, and most recently for Lion and all modern versions of OS X.

We are celebrating our history with a sale! For the entire month of February 2016, Solitaire Till dawn is half-price in the App Store. Tell your friends!

Visit Solitaire Till Dawn in the App Store

And if you'd like more detail on our 25-year odyssey, you can read The History of Solitaire Till Dawn at our main Web site.

The Future

Our journey isn't over yet, either! We are hard at work on an iPad version, which should be out sometime later this year. We've put a lot of thought into the best way to do solitaire on a tablet, and we think you'll like the results.

After that, there may be smaller versions for iPhones—we're not sure about that yet. The small screens of phones make it difficult to provide the rich feature set that is the hallmark of Solitaire Till Dawn. But we will certainly be looking into it.

Version 1.1 is here!

As promised a couple of weeks ago, version 1.1 is now available for download from the App Store! (Well, in the USA at least. Other App Stores in other regions should have it soon.) This is a free upgrade for everyone who purchased the original release—and if you haven't purchased yet, the price is the same: just US $9.99 for more than 100 games and an unrivaled feature set.

For more info on the new release, see our previous post or visit Solitaire Till Dawn in the App Store.

And after you've tried out this new release, please take a moment to review it in the App Store! That will help us make more sales, which will help us continue to improve Solitaire Till Dawn and help fund our progress on the iPad version. Thanks!

Version 1.1 is almost here!

We have submitted version 1.1 to the App Store, and we are now waiting for Apple to review and approve it before it will actually become available. This is a free upgrade, so if you've already purchased Solitaire Till Dawn, all you'll need to do is download it when it's ready.

As promised, this release includes the Custom Card Backs feature that allows you to create cardback art from your own photos and images. It also brings back the popular Magnetic Mouse feature that older versions once had, allowing nearly silent, clickless play. We've added six new solitaire games (bringing the total to 106). We've improved readability a bit by making the font size buttons in the status bar also affect the lists in the Games Drawer. And we've made a number of small, mostly cosmetic improvements and bug fixes.

There are two features you might not stumble across if we don't tell you about them, so here they are:

More detailed statistics
Some of you have wanted more fine-grained reporting of your statistics. So you're winning 49% of your games, but how close are you to 50%? Now you can option-click the status bar to change the display to show two decimal places: 49.68% instead of just 49%. Do it again to restore the default display.

Undo until this card moves
This is a feature for power users, who want to fully explore all the possible solutions to a tough game.  Just right-click (or control-click) a card, and a small popup menu will appear. If you click (say) a 5♣ the menu will contain two items: Undo until this 5♣ moves, and Redo until this 5♣ moves. This makes it easy to back up a game to the point where you made a critical choice, and then continue differently.

We'll post again when the new release is actually available, but if you're not watching this blog regularly, no worries. Your Mac will remind you about the update automatically.

A Little Progress Report

Back in February, we reported that we have an upgrade to Solitaire Till Dawn in the works, and that we had (just barely) begun work on a version for iPad.

Today we are pleased to report that the upgrade to the desktop version should be out either late this summer or in the fall. It will allow you to use your own photos to create custom cardbacks, it will bring back the popular Magnetic Mouse feature, and it will include several new kinds of solitaire, along with a few other improvements. This will be a free upgrade for all purchasers of the App Store version!

We are also delighted to report that we've now made some serious progress on the iPad version. Today, for the first time, we were able to play part of a game on the iPad simulator! That may not sound like much, but it means that an awful lot of code has been written and is now working.

We still have a long way to go, though. We still cannot predict when the iPad version will be available; only that it will not be soon. (Also please note that we are not ready for beta testing yet, and we are not accepting volunteers at this time. We haven't yet decided whether we will hold a public beta for the iPad version, as we did for the desktop version.)

Pricing has not yet been decided for the iPad, although we will likely offer a free, ad-supported version.