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 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 18: Scrunching Begone

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 18 is now available from our Beta Program page.

Scrunching
Judging from my email, ALL of you noticed a b17 bug that I missed: when you click the New Game button, the vertical card fans are often "scrunched" up tight, making it hard to see what cards are in the fan. (I was bemused to see how many of you used the word "scrunched".) Some of you figured out that adjusting the window size, even a little, would temporarily fix the problem. This was Bug ID 88.

Beta 18 should fix the issue permanently, and make real the promise of b17, that screen space would be put to better use to allow larger cards and longer fans. Hopefully I got it right this time.

Freezes and Crashes
I've had a number of reports recently of freezes and crashes, usually after lots of undoing. I have found and fixed a bug that would cause that behavior, so that's good. But I am not certain that this was the only problem, so if you get more crashes or freezes, let me know! I've left Bug ID 86 listed as "unfixed" in case this happens, and created bug ID 87 for this specific issue and marked that one as "fixed".

If we get lucky and see no more of this behavior, I'll eventually mark the less-specific bug 86 as "fixed" as well. Of course if we aren't lucky, I'll fix the additional problems first and then mark 86 as "fixed".

Stopping a run-away Undo
In the old Solitaire Till Dawn, if you clicked "Undo to Snapshot" or "Redo to Snapshot" and then wanted to stop the replay before it stopped on its own, you could stop it by clicking anywhere in the game window, including the toolbar. That's because back then, the toolbar was really a part of the game window. In this new version, I am using the standard OS X toolbar (for lots of really good reasons), but the drawback is that I cannot detect clicks in the toolbar itself; only clicks on its buttons. This means that you can't stop replay by clicking in any random part of the toolbar, and there's nothing I can do to change that. However…

A lot of you have been trying to stop replay by clicking the Redo (or Undo) button, and this is one of the ways to provoke the crash mentioned above. Beta 18 will now allow you to stop replay (safely!) in this way. But I'd like to remind you all that you can also stop replay by clicking anywhere in the playing area of the window, or by pressing any key! That's always been true, and has never changed.

Empty Piles and Card Highlighting
Many have reported that if you resize the window or choose a different card size, the empty foundations in games like Canfield would lose their markings, and the highlighted cards would lose their highlights. I never got around to giving this one a bug ID, but it's fixed in b18.

Game Numbers
One alert user (thank you!) found a case where a game number from the old version of Solitaire Till Dawn produced a different game in the beta (bug ID 63). While this is not an issue that many people will care about, I'm glad to report that it's fixed in b18.

Other Changes
…are mostly minor cosmetic issues. For example, the old shark-and-cards icon was still visible in a lot of places, and these have now mostly been updated to the new icon. (You can still see the old icon in some of the Help pages and in the Tour. I'll get those updated too, sometime before we ship.)

Beta 9

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 9 is now available from our Beta Program page.

Although beta 8 cleared up a lot of the launch-and-quit issues, some have lingered. In this release, we hope to make improvements on two serious problems.

Bug ID 39 should now be fixed. This one was preventing Solitaire Till Dawn from quitting when you select the Quit menu item, or press cmd-Q. It happened when the drawer was still open in the game window, and we fixed it by making sure that the drawer gets closed whenever the application tries to quit.

Bug ID 43 was a weird one. Some users reporting always seeing the same saved game, whenever they opened Solitaire Till Dawn, instead of seeing the last game they had played. And that was followed by getting the same series of shuffles in new games, instead of getting an unrepeating sequence of new games. I have to blush about this: you can quit Solitaire Till Dawn by simply closing the game window, but I forgot to make sure that the current game gets saved when you do that! So now I've fixed that, and the problem should not happen again.

I'm still tweaking the card graphics. In this release, the "10" rank is different: it uses a more standard font, and stylistically looks better and more like the other ranks. This should solve Bug ID 37, where some users saw the "10" in a very tiny font.

For the few users who use the Players feature, the My Favorites list is now correctly updated when you switch Players. The Game Info panel displays the game description text correctly in all cases. And finally, users who had custom cardbacks in the old Solitaire Till Dawn were seeing blank cardbacks until they chose a cardback from the ones offered in the Decor panel. Custom cardbacks will not be supported in the first release, but now such users will see a default cardback image instead of a blank one, and will be told why.

Poll Results
Thanks to the well-over-150 people who responded to our poll! The results were interesting, if a bit confusing in places.

The first poll section, The Beta Program, was meant to evaluate how many people were actively participating in the program. Somewhat to my surprise, only a bit more than 2/3 of the poll respondents answered that they had actually downloaded and used any of the beta releases.

That initial result has an effect on how we interpret the rest of the questions. If only 2/3 of the respondents have actually used the beta, then we must assume that only 2/3 of the answers to the rest of the questions are really relevant. The rest are either answering about their experience with the old version of Solitaire Till Dawn (our fault: we should have made it more clear that we wanted answers about the beta versions only), or else they just like taking polls.

But it doesn't matter very much. We were looking for clear evidence of portions of Solitaire Till Dawn that are hard to understand, and fudging the percentages a bit doesn't make that much difference. Here's what we think we learned:

• Most people can find and use the Preferences window, and the Decor window. That's good.
• Most people can find the built-in Help and use it, though many did not bother to do so.
• Few people took the tour that is offered at first launch, but most of those who did take the tour found it useful.
• Most people seem able to use the Game Browser to read rules.
• Only a few use the Game Browser to find more solitaires that they might like.
• Few users know about the many keyboard shortcuts that Solitaire Till Dawn offers.

That's mostly good news. I would like to increase the number of users who take the Tour, but it may be that most of you beta users already knew about new features like the Game Drawer by reading my pre-beta blog posts.

Not many people are using the Game Browser to find new solitaires; but most people seem to like to play just a few favorites, so perhaps that's natural.

My biggest concern is the keyboard shortcuts. Some of those are very useful, and there are a lot of them. I'd like to make them more visible.

For now, if you're a beta user who hasn't been using the keyboard much, I suggest you open the Help, scroll down to the bottom of the Table of Contents, and click on Keyboard Shortcuts. You might learn something cool!

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♣.

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.

Mavericks

A few people have asked me about Mavericks, the soon-to-be-released Mac OS X 10.9. (I'm going to miss the cat names that Apple has used for all their earlier releases.)

From what I've seen so far, there's no reason why Solitaire Till Dawn won't be fully compatible with Mavericks  I intend for the new Solitaire Till Dawn to work with any version of Mac OS X from Lion (10.7) at least up through Mavericks—of course I can't promise anything beyond that at this time, since we have no idea what future OS X releases will be like.

My last post went up only about 24 hours ago, but I have been working since then. I am writing the online help. Yesterday I spent mostly fighting with CSS, trying to get the pages nicely laid out. In the process I got the first few pages of help written in the new style; their actual text content I just copied from the old version, because none of that info had changed much in the new release.

I've learned some useful trivia in the process, such as how to write "⌘" in HTML. (It's ⌘ if you're curious.)

Today I'm starting to design the pages for stuff that has changed. So I have to write new text, but at least I've mostly got the formatting problems solved now. Onward!