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.

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!

Gifting Solitaire Till Dawn

The holiday season is upon us, and I'm pleased to have heard from some folks asking how to give Solitaire Till Dawn as a gift.

Sadly, the App Store does not provide any way to do this directly. But you can give a sort of online gift card which the recipient can use to make purchases in iTunes or in the App Store, and you can tell the recipient that you had Solitaire Till Dawn in mind. Here's how to do it:

Open iTunes, and click "iTunes Store". (In iTunes 12 on Yosemite, this link is at the top of the window, just under the toolbar.) You will have to log in to your iTunes account, if you aren't already logged in.

Now find the "Quick Links" section, on the right side of the window, a few inches down from the top. Click the "Send iTunes Gifts" link. A window will appear with a form for you to fill in. Enter the email address of the recipient, and select an amount. (The smallest amount is $10, which is enough for Solitaire Till Dawn.) You can add a message to the recipient, and tell them about Solitaire Till Dawn if you wish.

And that should do it. Although it's an "iTunes Gift", the recipient can still use it in the App Store, to purchase Solitaire Till Dawn or anything else.

Happy Holidays!

Live in the App Store!

Semicolon LLC is pleased to announce that, after over five years of hard work, Solitaire Till Dawn is available for purchase in the Mac App Store.

We would like to acknowledge the huge debt of gratitude that we owe to all of our faithful, diligent, and patient beta testers. We could not have done this without you!

The beta program is now closed, and no further betas will be issued for the foreseeable future.

Important:
If you purchase Solitaire Till Dawn from the Mac App Store and don't find it in your Applications folder afterwards, please delete all your beta copies, then go to your Purchases in the App Store, find the entry for Solitaire Till Dawn, and click the Install button. This issue seems only to affect beta testers.

Please visit the Semicolon LLC web site for more information, and for a link to Solitaire Till Dawn in the App Store. If you need to contact us about Solitaire Till Dawn, please use the link on that site.

Thanks, everybody!

Submitted for Review

A reminder: beta 28 is now available from our Beta Program page. You're going to want it when b27 expires on Saturday!

Submitted for Review!

Today I pushed two big buttons: the first uploaded Solitaire Till Dawn 1.0.0 to the App Store, and the second submitted it for review by Apple. But it won't appear in the App Store or be available for purchase until Apple has reviewed and approved it, so you still can't buy it yet!

If we're lucky, it will be approved probably sometime next week. If we're not, Apple will find something they want changed or fixed, and I'll have to deal with that problem and then start the review process again. I've never done this before: over 25 years I've released more apps and upgrades for Macs than I can remember or count, but I have never done so through the App Store. There's a fair chance that, through inexperience, I've left some i undotted or some t uncrossed. We'll have to wait a few days, and then we'll find out.

In the meantime: I promised that I would keep a free beta available until we are in the App Store. Beta 27 will expire on Saturday, so go grab a copy of beta 28 from the Beta Program page. It's good through mid-November, and I really hope that will be long enough. If not, I'll put out a b29, and keep doing it until Apple grants us our place in the App Store.

You can read more about b28 in the previous post.

Beta 28: Waiting for Apple

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 28 is now available from our Beta Program page.

This beta contains almost no significant changes from the previous beta, b27. We are essentially ready to submit Solitaire Till Dawn to the App Store—it could happen as soon as tomorrow or even later today—but we are waiting to get an answer to a tax-form question before we can commit.

Once that's done and we have submitted the app, we will have to wait for Apple to review and approve Solitaire Till Dawn before it can actually become available for sale. We expect this to take at least a week, because Apple has to review every app and app upgrade and they always have a lot of them to get through. If Apple finds any problem with Solitaire Till Dawn, there will be further delay while we work with Apple to resolve the issue. We hope that nothing like that will happen, but it might anyway.

In the meantime, we have promised you that there will be a free beta version available until the real thing can be purchased, and that's what b28 is about. The previous beta, b27, will expire in about three days, but b28 is good for another two weeks, to mid-November. We hope that by then we'll be in the App Store, but if not, we'll put out yet another beta with a later expiration date.

The Help Pages

Nobody ever reads the Help! Or so it seems. We've gone to a lot of trouble to provide you with a complete, built-in guide to Solitaire Till Dawn. It is illustrated; it is searchable; it has a good Table of Contents; and there is a "Quick Start" page, an FAQ page and a "What's New" page to help you quickly get answers to the most common questions.

The Help can teach you about cool features of Solitaire Till Dawn that you may not know about yet! Most bug reports lately have not really been reporting bugs; they've been users expressing confusion about features that they could have read about in the Help. We've done our best to make Solitaire Till Dawn intuitive and easy to use, but it has a LOT of fancy features. The Help will tell you about them—try it and see! 

The b28 release contains a few improvements to the formatting of some of the Help pages, and other recent betas contained some major improvements to the Help pages. But you may not see the changes unless you're careful, because Apple's help system isn't good about showing you the help pages from the latest version of any app. To see the latest, you really should remove all earlier versions of Solitaire Till Dawn from your system—or at least compress them, if you don't want to throw them completely away.

Beta 27: Animation Speeds

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 27 is now available from our Beta Program page.

We're getting down to the little stuff now, and I seriously hope that Solitaire Till Dawn will be finished and available for purchase within the next few weeks.

Beta 27 addresses an issue that a number of users have complained about: the feeling that the new Solitaire Till Dawn feels "sluggish" in comparison with the old one. Part of this is due to Apple's Core Animation package, which did not exist when the old version was current. Core Animation is designed to make animations look smooth, rather than to make things happen quickly; and it operates in the background, so that I can't always guarantee that animations will happen promptly.

But mostly, Core Animation uses a different paradigm for expressing how quickly an animation should happen, and that made it difficult for me to translate the old speeds into the new paradigm. I spent some time on it this past week, and I think b27 is a big improvement. Animations are now faster by default than they were in b26 and earlier betas, and it feels much more like the old STD.

But wait, there's more: I have added an Animation pane to the Preferences window. There's now a slider to let you choose your animation speed. The slowest setting is the speed of b26 and before; the second notch is the new, quicker default; and there are two even faster notches that you can experiment with. If you feel that b27 is too quick, go to the Animations pane and select the slowest setting. If you find it's still too leisurely, select a faster setting.

In addition, I've fixed a bug that could display a game's final duration as being one second shorter than it actually was. The bug happens only in rare cases. Suppose, for example, you play a game and win it in just a hair more than 60 seconds. The clock display in the status bar might still be displaying 59 seconds because that display hadn't quite been updated yet, so it would look to you like you finished in just 59 seconds. But your game would be correctly recorded in your statistics as lasting 60 seconds. This made it look as though your 59-second game was not being recorded correctly; but in fact, it really was a 60-second game properly recorded. It just wasn't displayed correctly in the status bar. In b27, care is taken to ensure that the clock display is fully up to date after you win a game.

There are also a number of new menu items, each of which does the same thing as one of the toolbar buttons. This is for Apple's Human Interface guidelines: you don't have to have all those buttons in the toolbar, but there should still be a way to use their functions. The new menu items let you do that.

The Last Beta?

So is b27 the last beta? Probably not, but I am pretty much out of bugs to fix and features to implement for this first release. Unless I hear something significant from one of you, or find some new problem or issue myself, any further betas will not be much different from b27.

I have promised to keep a free beta available until the finished product can be purchased in the App Store, and I will keep that promise. Beta 27 will expire at the end of this month, and if Solitaire Till Dawn is not in the App Store by then, I will put out a beta 28 with a later expiration date.

Beta 26—Almost There!

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 26 is now available from our Beta Program page.

Crashes and Freezes

If you've been with us for a while, you know that we've been trying to track down and fix a problem that many users never see, but that can cause a freeze or a crash for some. I was one of those who never saw the problem, which made it nearly impossible for me to diagnose and fix it. But with the help of a couple of dedicated beta testers (who wish to remain nameless), I think we've finally got it whipped. The fix has already been tested on several machines and under all versions of Mac OS X, and it seems to work. Beta 26 has this fix.

This was the LAST SHOW-STOPPER BUG that I know about. I am hoping that there will be no more crashes or freezes now, although of course it's always possible that we will find other problems lurking behind this one. But I think we are near the end of the road now. I am hoping to be able to release Solitaire Till Dawn to the App Store sometime this fall, and in time for the holidays.

Card Highlighting

For the previous public release (b24), I made a foolish change in the way that card highlighting behaved. Within 24 hours I decided it was a mistake, and many of you sent me bug reports to say the same.

For b26 I've removed that change and restored the old behavior: so whenever you make a move, any card-rank highlighting will automatically be canceled. (And remember, you can always cancel card-rank highlighting by pressing the Shift key: when you press Shift, available cards will be highlighted; and when you release it, your normal default highlighting if any is restored.)

Built-in Help

The built-in Help pages (available by choosing Help > Solitaire Till Dawn Help, or by clicking the life-saver icon in the toolbar) are a complete, illustrated guide to Solitaire Till Dawn. I've spent most of the past week making improvements to it. The text formatting, page layout, and navigation links are better and more readable. The illustrations are up to date. Some old, out-of-date pages have been corrected, and so on. Really, the built-in Help is like a small book, and any of you who have written and published a book will know how much work that is! But I'm happy with the improvements, and I hope you will be too.

Beta 22, and UFOs

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 22 is now available from our Beta Program page.

What's New
Little stuff, mostly. Bug IDs 82 and 92, the last bugs in the list still labeled as "unfixed", have been fixed! These will solve some issues with scrolling in the game lists, and some failures to properly record scores for some games won with the early-win option. In addition we have made a half-dozen or so other little improvements, not worth listing here. You can read about them in the Read Me for b22, if you wish.

Crashers and UFOs
We still have at least one crashing bug that I never listed in the public bug list, but that I have been working on for some time. I know, from your crash reports (thank you for those!) that it is a real bug; but after weeks of effort I am still unable to make it happen on my own machines where I could study it. Although a few of you have sent your "formulas" for making the crash happen on your machines, none of them had any effect for me.

This crash is the last serious bug in Solitaire Till Dawn, at least that I know about right now. I would hate to ship the app without fixing it, but I am not willing to delay forever, either. I currently intend to give it another couple of weeks, maybe a month; if I haven't made any progress by then, I will probably go ahead and publish. While the bug has affected more than one of you, others have reported months of trouble-free operation, so I think (I hope!) that it is at least a rare event. If I'm wrong, I'll hear about it within a week of shipping it, I'm sure. :-/

So much for crashers. What (I hear you ask) are UFOs? That's my little shorthand name for a certain class of bug report. "UFO" stands for "Unidentified Flying Object", and some people think that some unidentified flying things are alien spaceships; but I don't think that's so. Many such sightings (not all) have been shown to be meteors, balloons, flying toys, ordinary airplanes seen from unusual angles, and so on. Of course I can't prove that there aren't any flying saucers flitting around up there, but I haven't seen enough evidence yet to convince me that they're really there.

And the same with certain bug reports: every so often I get one that sounds like a sober, correct report of a genuine problem; and yet I have reason to think it's mistaken and not really a bug. For example, if someone tells me that there's no Jack of Diamonds in a game they're playing, they're almost certainly wrong, and just haven't realized that there's a legitimate place where that Jack might be hidden. Why am I sure they're wrong? Because by now, thousands of games of solitaire have been played with Solitaire Till Dawn, and there has never been one genuine case of a missing card. That doesn't prove that I don't have some weird, rarely-occurring bug, but it's seriously unlikely.

When I get such a report, I pay attention; but I don't immediately start looking for a solution to the problem, because there likely isn't any problem. It would be a waste of my time (and yours, while you wait for me to finish this thing up and ship it). But I do make a note of the report, and keep my eyes peeled for any more reports of similar effects—just in case I'm wrong and the reporter was right.

In the meantime, the report gets classified as "I'm sure you saw something interesting, but I'm not sure you saw what you think you saw." In other words, a sort of UFO report. I now have a small collection of these for the Solitaire Till Dawn betas. If you are one of the people who sent me a report and never saw me mention it again, please don't think I'm ignoring you! I've kept all the reports you've all sent me. But I have to decide where my time is best spent, and if your report looks like a UFO to me, I'm taking a bet that it's not worth my time to investigate it deeply.

So, when...?
When will you be able to buy a real copy? I still don't know. If I can get a handle on the crasher bug in the next couple of weeks, you can bet I will be trying to squash that one before we ship. If not, it will still take me a while to clean up from the beta testing and get all the legal stuff ready; and then it will likely take Apple anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to approve Solitaire Till Dawn for the App Store after I submit it.

But I certainly hope and intend to have it available well before Christmas.

Watch this space!

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♣.

Back in the Saddle

No news since March! Time for an update.

The house-moving is done, yay! (Well, it's never completely done, but it's 99% done and the rest isn't urgent.) The family's health issues I've been alluding to are also mostly resolved, and in a good way: we're all doing fine, thanks.

So... does that mean I'm finally back to work on Solitaire Till Dawn?

Yes. Yes, it does. It's taken half of a year to get all of these issues taken care of, but life is finally settling back towards sanity, and I have actually been able to spend time on software development during the last few weeks. Here's where we are:

I am nearly done with adding features (whether new or old). Most recently I completed work on the old "Game Number" feature, where every shuffle has a number that can be used to re-create it. You can share a challenge with a friend, for example, by choosing "Show Game Number" from the File menu and sending the number to your friend, who enters it by choosing "Play Game Number" and entering the number you sent.

I have also finished adding in some missing behaviors. For example, until a couple of weeks ago, selecting "New Game" didn't give you any warning or chance to change your mind if you were in the middle of an unfinished game. Now the old preference settings for that sort of thing are fully implemented, and you do get the warning and chance to cancel if, for example, you clicked the New Game button by accident.

This morning I achieved a really good improvement in startup time. It had been taking 30 seconds or longer to launch Solitaire Till Dawn and present the game window; now it takes about 3 seconds.

So all of that is just to show you that yes, I've been working! But I know that what you really want to know is what's left to do, and how long it will take.

Sorry, but I still can't predict how long it will take to finish. (Pause for loud groans from the audience, and a few people shouting boo! and throwing overripe fruit.) This is because much of what's left isn't up to me.

There's still the polish-and-debug stage to get through; that part is up to me. It will be done when I feel like all of the significant bugs are fixed, and when I'm not finding new ones very often. But I've done a lot of that already, as I worked on other things, so I'm not too concerned about it.

I also have to write the online help. That will take time, but it's pretty straightforward and I don't expect any big difficulties or setbacks; so I'm not too concerned about that either.

Then there's artwork. This is a big deal. When I wrote the first version of Solitaire Till Dawn, most of my customers still had black-and-white Macs with a tiny screen. It was fairly easy for me to provide all the artwork, even though I'm not much of an artist. When the Mac II and larger color screens started getting popular, it was harder (because I'm not much of an artist!) but I could still manage on my own. But when really big, deep-color Macs became common, I started having to hire real artists. Nowadays, the App Store and the high-resolution Retina displays have raised the bar absurdly high. All of the artwork must be of professional quality: not only because users have come to expect it, but because the App Store will not accept apps that look slapdash. (For example, every app must have an app icon in deep color, and sized at 1024x1024 pixels! That's bigger than my cards used to be!) So one of my next tasks is to come up with a comprehensive list of images—card art, app icon, toolbar buttons, dialog images, status bar icons, etc.—and hire somebody to make them. And then wait for them to be done.

And when everything is really done and ready to go, I have to submit it to the App Store. Getting a new app approved can take months, from what I'm told.

So hang in there, if you can. I know that inevitably some of you are going to give up on waiting. I'm truly sorry to disappoint you; I probably want this done myself more than anyone else on the planet; but as I keep saying, it's a big job and it will take as long as it takes.

But I am working on it!