CSS, pronounced "cuss"

I am currently spending most of my time writing the Help Book, the built-in manual for how to use Solitaire Till Dawn.

Help Books are a collection of pages, all written (like a Web page) in HTML. Apple's Help Viewer is basically a sort of customized Web browser. Pages written for a Help Book can also be viewed in any handy Web browser, and in fact that's handy for debugging.

The Help Book for the last version of Solitaire Till Dawn was mostly written in 2000, a good 13 years ago now. I wrote very simple HTML for those pages. Since then new standards have emerged, so I'm trying to write proper, modern HTML for the new version's Help Book. And this means using CSS.

For those not familiar, CSS ("cascading style sheets") is a way to separate the layout and styling of web pages from the actual text and images. You write a CSS file that defines layouts and styles, and then you write any number of Web (or Help Book) pages that link to that single CSS file. This means that all of those pages share the same layout and styles, and it also means that you can change the layout and styles for all those pages by editing the single CSS file, instead of having to edit all the separate Web pages.

That's a great thing, and it's the reason I'm using CSS for this release. It's really the right way to go. But there is a dark side to the force that is CSS: doing simple things is simple, but anything very fancy can be difficult to figure out and debug. An example: I want my Help pages to have a navigation column on the left, with constant width; and the main text on the right, taking up the rest of the page width. It takes only a few lines of CSS to do this, but it took me hours to figure out what those lines were. I made several attempts that seemed like they ought to work, but didn't. In the end, Google was my friend and found me a tutorial that showed me the right way to do it.

In addition, I'm still working on refining the styles: fonts, faces, lists, headers, menu item and button labels, and so on. Apple's Style Guide is good for this and I'm mostly following it, but there's still room to make my own decisions, good or bad. (I'm trying to make good ones.)

Now that the main layout elements are done, I can mostly concentrate on writing the text. Some of this I can copy from the old Help Book, because a lot of it hasn't changed. Other parts must be heavily edited, and some must be written from scratch. In addition I need a completely new set of screen shots, because the appearance of Solitaire Till Dawn and its dialogs and buttons and menus has changed quite a bit. I think I've got about half of it written by now, although I'll have to go over the whole thing more than once for review and editing and cleanup before it's really done.

A side benefit of writing the Help Book is that it makes me go back and test all of the features, one by one, to make sure they really behave the way I say they do. This has smoked out several bugs that I will have to fix before release.

In other news, I put some time in on Retina-compatible graphics and I'm pleased with the results. I think I won't have to hire out any artwork except for the app icon itself, which will save both money and time.

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!