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!

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.

News, and Tips: Play by Keyboard

We haven't posted for a while, but we haven't vanished! Here's a little news for you, followed by the first in a series of "Tips" for getting more fun out of Solitaire Till Dawn.

News

Solitaire Till Dawn has been in the App Store for nearly four months now, and it's doing well. (It could always do better—tell your friends!) We now have 70 ratings, all but three of which are a full 5 stars. (If you like Solitaire Till Dawn, please help us out by rating it in the App Store—thanks!) And our support email has been minimal, and mostly concerned with App Store issues; no big bugs have been found since the release, which is great!

So what's next? We have an upgrade in the works. The upgrade will be free if you've already purchased Solitaire Till Dawn through the App Store. It will bring back the popular Magnetic Mouse feature, and the ability to create custom cardback images from your own photos. There will be a new feature too, one that should please some of the hard-core players out there. We don't have a schedule for the release yet, sorry.

What about iPad? That's in the works too, but (sorry!) it's still a long way off. We have barely started on that project.

Tips: Play by Keyboard

We intend to post some tips, from time to time, highlighting features of Solitaire Till Dawn that you may not know about, or showing off some of the more obscure yet interesting games. You can look for these articles by searching for the Tips tag.

In this, our first Tips article, we'd like to tell you about playing without using the mouse. Mice are great, but sometimes it's easier and faster to just type, and Solitaire Till Dawn will (mostly) let you do that.

Selecting an Available Card
Whenever you can make a legal move (other than dealing from the deck), there are one or more cards that you can pick up. Although it usually doesn't show, one of them is always the "selected" card. Pressing the Return key has the same effect as clicking that card: it will fly off to one of its legal destinations.

If there's more than one card that can be moved, you can change which one is selected. Press either the left or right arrow key and you'll see a yellow oval appear over one of the available cards. The oval shows that that card is selected, and it is the one that will move if you press Return. Keep pressing the left or right arrow keys, and the selection will change: the yellow oval will move to another available card with each press. When you've selected the card you want, press Return to move it.

The yellow oval doesn't stop you from using the mouse. Make any move you like, and the yellow oval will disappear until you press one of the arrow keys again.

Multiple Destinations
What if the card could go to more than one destination, and doesn't go to the one you want? Sorry, at this time you have to hit Undo and then use the mouse to drag the card to your desired destination. We hope to address this problem in a future release.

Dealing
You can deal by pressing ⌘D, or by pressing the Tab key.

Undo and Redo
Press Escape (ESC) to undo, and press the Space Bar to redo.

There! Now you can play most games without reaching for the mouse. Enjoy!