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 Some old, out-of-date pages have been corrected, and so on.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 24

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 24 is now available from our Beta Program page.

Crashes and Freezes—Please Read!

For the past few months Solitaire Till Dawn has mostly seemed solid and stable, with one big exception: every so often, somebody will experience an unexpected crash in the middle of playing an otherwise-ordinary game. I know from your detailed reports (thank you!) that this is a real problem; but I've been seriously hampered by the fact that I have never seen this crash on my own systems.

Some of you have told me that you can reliably produce the crash by some procedure on one of your systems, but every person who has told me this has a different way of making it happen! And no matter how carefully I reproduce your setup and follow your instructions, the crash never happens on my own machines. This all makes it very difficult for me to figure out what's wrong, and impossible for me to be certain (from my own testing) to know if any change I make has helped.

But I have been working on it anyway, and I may have made some progress. This b24 release contains some changes that I believe fix a real problem, one that might result in the kind of crashes and freezes that some of you have seen. But I can't know for sure until you folks have run it through its paces. So:

If you've seen crashes or freezes recently, please try to make them happen with b24. If you find that you no longer see the problem, please let me know! And of course, if you do experience new crashes, please send me the crash report as usual. This is the last important bug to fix before we can ship the product! I really want this fixed, and you can help.

Other Changes in b24

Rank Highlighting: Press (for example) 'j' to highlight all the Jacks; if you then move a Jack, the highlighting on that Jack would disappear, although all other Jacks would remain highlighted. In b24, the moved card retains its highlighting.

Game List Scrolling is improved, especially on Lion and Snow Leopard where it has been very jerky and flickery.

The Game Info Panel now always appears (after the usual half-second delay) whenever the selected game is visible in the game list.

Play Game Number: This dialog did not work under Snow Leopard; now it does.

Rouge et Noir: The 'Deal' command will now move a card from the stock to the discard pile, if the stock is not empty. If the stock is empty, dealing will recycle the discards as before.

Beta Notice: In the panel that appears at startup to show the expiration date, there is now a button labeled "Check for Updates". Clicking that button will open the Beta Program page on this web site, where you can see whether a later beta version is available, and download it if so. This feature is a bit late in coming, since we are hoping that we are nearly done with the beta program! But we have promised to keep a usable beta available to you all until the final product is available from the App Store, and until then this button should be helpful.

Why It's Difficult

Just for fun: Today's XKCD comic doesn't really explain why some of the things you'd like me to do are difficult, but it at least recognizes the problem:

Beta 17: Bigger Cards

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 17 is now available from our Beta Program page.

What's New

I have been nearly drowned in requests for larger cards and better use of screen space. This release should provide that, in many if not all cases. The significant change is that downward fans are now allowed to extend all the way to the bottom of the window and if necessary, even below the bottom of the window (but never so far that you can't clearly see or click on all the cards).

If that doesn't quite make sense, just try it: download b17, and try selecting a larger card size in each game that you play. That's important: you may not see a change unless you request a larger card size! To ask for larger cards, look at the card size menu (Decor > Card Size) and choose something larger than your current size. I recommend simply asking for the largest size ("Huge"); if that won't fit, Solitaire Till Dawn will give you the largest size that will fit your screen.

That lets Solitaire Till Dawn make better use of vertical space. There is also a small change to the use of horizontal space: I've added about 10 more pixels of horizontal space between the cards and the game drawer tabs on the left side of the window, by popular request. This means that every game will require that much more horizontal space. If you have a game window that is already using the maximum width of your screen, it's possible that this small expansion will mean that the card size you were using will no longer fit, and you will have to use a smaller card size. I think that's unlikely to happen. But if it does, please try selecting a larger card size just to be sure. If that doesn't work and you are still stuck with smaller cards, let me know and tell me which game you were playing and what size screen you have, please.

In addition to the card size changes, b17 includes a fair-sized list of less-obvious improvements and bug fixes which you can read about in the Read Me file that comes with the download.

Known Bugs

I am aware from your bug reports (thank you!) that a crash can occur during normal play. This is now Bug ID 86. Normally I would try to fix such a bug before bringing out a new release, but I want to make b17 available well before b16 expires at the end of May. I will do my best to fix this issue for b18.

Beta 15

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 15 is now available from our Beta Program page.

This release fixes bugs 52, 65, 68, and 79. Not many bugs fixed, but they are important ones:

Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8)

At long last, we have restored compatibility with Snow Leopard. Beta 15 should work on Snow Leopard machines (along with all later versions of Mac OS X), and we're looking forward to hearing from those of you who have Snow Leopard to test on. Update: Some users are still having problems. We think this is due to old data from earlier versions, and we are looking into it.

Concurrency Issues

I've ranted about concurrent programming in the past, and more than once I've thought I had all those problems fixed; but they have kept coming back. Now, once again, I think I have them all fixed, and maybe I'll be right this time. This was bug 79 that caused problems with Accordion, but it could affect other games as well. We also fixed an un-numbered bug that caused crashes with rapid undo and redo (as opposed to Undo All and Redo All).

Empty Foundations

Another recurring bug (so often that I mistakenly gave this bug two numbers, 52 and 68) caused empty foundation piles to be slow in showing the ranks that could be played there. Again, I am hoping that this is finally fixed for good and all.

What's Next?

Oh, lots of things. I am hoping that I am now down to a list of relatively minor issues: worth fixing, but not as awful or urgent as the crashing bugs we've all been chasing for so long. Solitaire Till Dawn isn't done yet, but I hope that b15 will be a big step toward real stability.

BETA 13: No Crashes (we hope)

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 13 is now available from our Beta Program page.

Important: Some of b12's problems can persist in a saved game. We recommend starting a new game the first time you open b13, instead of trying to play the saved game from b12. Otherwise you may still see crashing or incorrect behavior, even when using b13.

What's New
As you all must know by now, the previous release b12 had serious crashing bugs that affected nearly all users. We believe that b13 will be much more stable. In addition, we believe we have fixed the problem of inappropriately face down cards that many users saw on Lion.

Some of you have reported seeing the same shuffles over and over in b12. This is a side effect of the crashes: if Solitaire Till Dawn does not quit properly, it can't save any information about which shuffles you have already played. If it doesn't crash, you shouldn't see repeated games.

Finally, we have made some subtle adjustments to the pacing of the animations; we hope that this will make them more attractive, and even perhaps more informative by making it more obvious what happens when you deal in some games.

Update: Some of you have found that there are still cases where cards are incorrectly face down, and a few of you have experienced crashes. The face down cards seem to happen when rapidly undoing or redoing, either by repeatedly clicking the Undo or Redo buttons or by repeatedly using their keyboard shortcuts. It doesn't seem to happen if you just click Undo to Snapshot or Redo to Snapshot. The face down cards still work as if they were face up; and you can get them to show correctly by changing the card size (after which you can change it back to the size you were using before).

Update: Also, I have learned that you can cause a crash pretty easily if you click the "New Game" button before your current game is quite through moving cards around. To avoid this crash, always wait a second or so after all the cards have stopped moving before trying to start a new game.

Testing
We tested this release, a lot. So why am I so carefully saying "we believe we have fixed it" instead of just "we fixed it"?

Most of the crashes and face down cards in b12 were due to race conditions in concurrent code. We know that many of you won't know what that buzz phrase means; that's okay. The important thing is that this kind of problem does not always behave exactly the same way every time, nor on every machine, nor under every version of Mac OS X. It can also behave differently simply because one is trying to debug it (the dreaded heisenbug).

As you can imagine, this can make it very difficult to be certain that a problem is really fixed. So while we have done a lot of testing of different games on different Macs with different versions of OS X, all we can really say for sure is that we haven't seen b13 crash or seriously screw up the graphics yet. To be certain (of either success or failure), we need you guys on your hundreds of different Macs, playing hundreds of different games. If you see a problem, do as you've been doing: tell us about it! And if you haven't seen any problems after using b13 for a few days, tell us that too!

What Isn't New
This release still will not run successfully on Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8). We intend to try to restore Snow Leopard compatibility in a later release, but for now it was important to fix the serious problems that everyone was seeing, regardless of which OS they use.

A word about bug reports
Recently we've been telling you not to send us any more crash reports for b12, because we already had more than we needed. But now that's over: for b13, we want every crash report you see, thanks!

I'd like to remind you all that when you send us a bug report, please include at least the following information:

• The beta version you were using
• The version of Mac OS X you were using
• The game you were playing (Klondike Familiar, Free Cell, Canfield, or whatever)
• A careful description of what happened and why you think it was wrong.

You cannot send file attachments using the Bug Report form. If you need to send us an attachment (such as a screen shot), you can send us a description of the problem and mention that you have additional files to send. We'll reply and tell you how to send them to us.

If you experience a crash, your Mac will display a crash report for you, and ask whether to send it to Apple. Here's what to do:

• Don't send it to Apple. They can't do anything about it, and they will ignore it.
• Do copy all the text from the window, paste it into out Bug Report form, and send it to us.

Thanks!

Beta 12: Returning to Stability

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 12 is now available from our Beta Program page.

This release is valid through the end of March.

Once again, we are releasing a beta in a certain amount of haste, because the previous beta will expire in just a day or two. We had hoped for beta 12 to be really solid, and to fix more of the "small bugs" that don't cause crashes. And we do think this release is a big improvement, with a long list of bug fixes since beta 11.

But it's not perfect. We have seen one crash while using Undo to Snapshot to rewind a long game of Forty Thieves back to the start. We're sure it can happen with other games as well. But it seems to be difficult to reproduce, because we've had no problems doing the same thing with other games of Forty Thieves, and in other solitaires, in repeated tests. We do have a notion of what the problem is, and we will be working on it.

Also, we apologize to all of you who are running Snow Leopard, but beta 12 is broken on Snow Leopard (10.6.8) just like b11 and b10 were. We do intend to address this issue and restore compatibility with Snow Leopard, but we didn't have time to do this for beta 12.

In addition to fixing a large number of bugs from the Bug List, we put a fair amount of work into improving some of the animations in b12. Those of you who complained about the odd "twisting" effect when dealing in Klondike and related games should see a more normal-looking animation in b12. We have also adjusted some of the timing, to make sequences of animations (such as refilling the deck and then dealing a new packet from the deck onto the discard in Klondike) more clear.

We are painfully aware that the animation improvements we introduced in b10 have seriously impacted the stability of Solitaire Till Dawn. Betas 10 and 11 were not really "beta-quality" releases, because there were enough problems to seriously violate the beta rule of "mostly working, most of the time". And b12 still does not have that quality for Snow Leopard. But we're working hard to get that reliability, robustness, and stability back.

Stay tuned, and as always, thanks for your patience, your hard work on our behalf, and your support!