Almost March

It's nearly the end of February, and b11 will expire in a couple of days. I'm starting to get worried emails from some of you.

Relax: I should have b12 out in a day or so. I had wanted to put more work into it before releasing it, because it is still not as robust as b9 (the last beta before I reworked the animation). But I don't want to reward your patience and hard work by cutting you off completely, so I'll get b12 out in the next day or two, and it will have an expiration date that will at least last through March.

The server problems we've had have continued to plague us. The server is up and running now, but we are still getting it tweaked, bringing new services online, and most importantly, documenting everything we had to do to get it running. That's in case we ever have to go through this again!

Because of this, I still haven't been able to spend as much time on solitaire development as I'd like. But I am back at work on it. If you check the Bug List, you'll see that quite a few bugs are marked as "fixed in b12". This next release won't be perfect, but it should be a big improvement.

But not for Snow Leopard. Beta 11 has serious problems on OS X 10.6.8, and I have not had time to address them for b12. I have not given up on Snow Leopard compatibility, but I'm afraid it's not there yet and I won't have time to fix it before b11 expires. (One problem is that, independently of our server issues, my Snow Leopard test machine has been giving me trouble. I think I've sort of got that under control now, too.)

Watch for the b12 release in the next day or two, and expect it to be better than b11 but not perfect.

Status Report, the sequel

I see that my last status update was ten days ago, and in it I apologized for the time I had to take to set up a new server. I said that I expected to get back to solitaire work shortly.

Turns out, I was far too optimistic. The server work that I thought was nearly done wasn't even close to done at that time. I won't bore you with the ugly details, but we've been working on this nearly non-stop all this time. The good news is that we believe (once again) that we are nearly done. We have accomplished all of the major tasks and proven that everything works. The most important part of this was email; for a while there our email access was spotty-to-nonexistent.

That is why I haven't been responding to any bug reports lately: you submit them via the form on this site, but they come to me by email, and my email wasn't working. But it is up and running now, and I see that I have over 200 unread reports to dig through. I will start on that today, and I will resume work on Solitaire Till Dawn as well.

As I posted earlier, I am aware that the latest beta is not working well for everyone. For some, it isn't working at all. I am sorry for the interruption, and of course I intend to get it fixed. But it may still be a while before the next release, because there's a lot wrong with the current release and I want the next one to be a lot more solid. Betas 10 and 11 were released in great haste, to get them out before we had to do the server work. I am going to take my time with beta 12.

As always, thanks for your patience and your support.

Beta 11: Right Side Up

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 11 is now available from our Beta Program page.

This release is a very quick turnaround meant to fix the issue that many of you saw with yesterday's b10 release: layouts and images appearing upside down. Again, I apologize for letting so egregious an error out into the world: the bug didn't show on my development system, and I did not test on enough other systems before releasing b10.

I have tested b11 on our Snow Leopard (10.6.8) machine, where b10 clearly showed the upside down layouts. b11 displays and runs correctly. I am hoping that this will fix the problem for all users.

In addition I have fixed two regressions: the Game Info panel was again missing some text in its "more info" section, and the Players panel was not accepting drops of image files. (Did you know that you can drop an image file onto an entry in the Players panel, to use as the avatar for that player? Well, for a while you couldn't because it was broken; but in b11 that's fixed and working again.)

Server Outage
Tomorrow, Thu Feb 6 2014, we are expecting some service outages. We are moving the server at semicolon.com from its current ancient and creaky hardware to a new, modern home. If you find that you cannot download b11, please be patient and try again later, or the next day. We'll be back up as quickly as we can.

We would rather have done this at a different time, but the old server has begun to exhibit signs of old-age crankiness. We need to get the new server up and running before the old one dies completely. Unfortunately this happened just when earlier betas are about to expire, and b10 turned up an unexpected, show-stopping bug. So I have rushed to get b11 out to you today. Tomorrow I will be working on getting the new server spiffed up and ready to go, and then we'll throw the big knife switch to move semicolon.com to the new hardware.

Thanks for your patience. We'll keep you posted.