Beta 6: More Readability

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 6 is now available for download from our Beta Program page.

Here's what's new:

Readability: Bug ID 24
After putting out Beta 5 with larger card indices, we learned that some of the troubles people have had with reading the cards was due to poor font management on our part. Beta 6 addresses that. Let us know how it looks to you.

"New Game" and "Dealing" Notifications: Bug ID 19
The little white-on-gray notices that pop up for new games and elaborate redeals are gone. I thought they were a good idea, but nobody liked them but me. I took them out.

Window moves on New Game: Bug ID 23
This bug was introduced in b5, and is now fixed in b6. Starting a new game no longer moves the window to the upper-left of your screen; instead it stays put, like it should.

Redeal Hangs: Bug ID 25
In some cases, dealing by pressing ⌘D or selecting the Deal menu item would blank the window, and just hang, never showing the cards again. This is fixed. 

The Clock: Bug ID 10
The clock now won't start timing your games until you make your first move. This is also true when resuming a saved game that already had time on the clock: the clock won't continue accumulating time until you make another move. So you can quit in mid-game, and then later when you start up again you can sit and stare at the layout as long as you like without adding time to the clock, until you start playing again.

"Card Minnow"
The old version of Solitaire Till Dawn assigned users a silly "rank" that was purely a measure of how many games you had played. You started at Card Minnow and over time you got promoted to Card Guppy, Card Clam, and so on.

The reason for this was actually to shame users who hadn't paid for their copy of Solitaire Till Dawn yet: it was an excuse to rub their noses in how many games they'd played for free. There's no need for it in this new version, but some users actually liked the silliness of it, so I put it in.

But it doesn't fit very well in this new version, and some of you have been complaining about it, while others have been confused by it. So I just took it out. (If you're one of those who liked it, sorry!)

There is still a mention of this feature in the Help pages under "Answers to Common Questions". I'm going to leave that in place for a little while, in case there's a backlash against removing the feature. (It's hard to please everybody!) If there is, I promise to find a less obtrusive way to tell users of their "promotions", and offer a way to turn them off. But for now, they're gone altogether.