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 27: Animation Speeds

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 27 is now available from our Beta Program page.

We're getting down to the little stuff now, and I seriously hope that Solitaire Till Dawn will be finished and available for purchase within the next few weeks.

Beta 27 addresses an issue that a number of users have complained about: the feeling that the new Solitaire Till Dawn feels "sluggish" in comparison with the old one. Part of this is due to Apple's Core Animation package, which did not exist when the old version was current. Core Animation is designed to make animations look smooth, rather than to make things happen quickly; and it operates in the background, so that I can't always guarantee that animations will happen promptly.

But mostly, Core Animation uses a different paradigm for expressing how quickly an animation should happen, and that made it difficult for me to translate the old speeds into the new paradigm. I spent some time on it this past week, and I think b27 is a big improvement. Animations are now faster by default than they were in b26 and earlier betas, and it feels much more like the old STD.

But wait, there's more: I have added an Animation pane to the Preferences window. There's now a slider to let you choose your animation speed. The slowest setting is the speed of b26 and before; the second notch is the new, quicker default; and there are two even faster notches that you can experiment with. If you feel that b27 is too quick, go to the Animations pane and select the slowest setting. If you find it's still too leisurely, select a faster setting.

In addition, I've fixed a bug that could display a game's final duration as being one second shorter than it actually was. The bug happens only in rare cases. Suppose, for example, you play a game and win it in just a hair more than 60 seconds. The clock display in the status bar might still be displaying 59 seconds because that display hadn't quite been updated yet, so it would look to you like you finished in just 59 seconds. But your game would be correctly recorded in your statistics as lasting 60 seconds. This made it look as though your 59-second game was not being recorded correctly; but in fact, it really was a 60-second game properly recorded. It just wasn't displayed correctly in the status bar. In b27, care is taken to ensure that the clock display is fully up to date after you win a game.

There are also a number of new menu items, each of which does the same thing as one of the toolbar buttons. This is for Apple's Human Interface guidelines: you don't have to have all those buttons in the toolbar, but there should still be a way to use their functions. The new menu items let you do that.

The Last Beta?

So is b27 the last beta? Probably not, but I am pretty much out of bugs to fix and features to implement for this first release. Unless I hear something significant from one of you, or find some new problem or issue myself, any further betas will not be much different from b27.

I have promised to keep a free beta available until the finished product can be purchased in the App Store, and I will keep that promise. Beta 27 will expire at the end of this month, and if Solitaire Till Dawn is not in the App Store by then, I will put out a beta 28 with a later expiration date.

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 22, and UFOs

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 22 is now available from our Beta Program page.

What's New
Little stuff, mostly. Bug IDs 82 and 92, the last bugs in the list still labeled as "unfixed", have been fixed! These will solve some issues with scrolling in the game lists, and some failures to properly record scores for some games won with the early-win option. In addition we have made a half-dozen or so other little improvements, not worth listing here. You can read about them in the Read Me for b22, if you wish.

Crashers and UFOs
We still have at least one crashing bug that I never listed in the public bug list, but that I have been working on for some time. I know, from your crash reports (thank you for those!) that it is a real bug; but after weeks of effort I am still unable to make it happen on my own machines where I could study it. Although a few of you have sent your "formulas" for making the crash happen on your machines, none of them had any effect for me.

This crash is the last serious bug in Solitaire Till Dawn, at least that I know about right now. I would hate to ship the app without fixing it, but I am not willing to delay forever, either. I currently intend to give it another couple of weeks, maybe a month; if I haven't made any progress by then, I will probably go ahead and publish. While the bug has affected more than one of you, others have reported months of trouble-free operation, so I think (I hope!) that it is at least a rare event. If I'm wrong, I'll hear about it within a week of shipping it, I'm sure. :-/

So much for crashers. What (I hear you ask) are UFOs? That's my little shorthand name for a certain class of bug report. "UFO" stands for "Unidentified Flying Object", and some people think that some unidentified flying things are alien spaceships; but I don't think that's so. Many such sightings (not all) have been shown to be meteors, balloons, flying toys, ordinary airplanes seen from unusual angles, and so on. Of course I can't prove that there aren't any flying saucers flitting around up there, but I haven't seen enough evidence yet to convince me that they're really there.

And the same with certain bug reports: every so often I get one that sounds like a sober, correct report of a genuine problem; and yet I have reason to think it's mistaken and not really a bug. For example, if someone tells me that there's no Jack of Diamonds in a game they're playing, they're almost certainly wrong, and just haven't realized that there's a legitimate place where that Jack might be hidden. Why am I sure they're wrong? Because by now, thousands of games of solitaire have been played with Solitaire Till Dawn, and there has never been one genuine case of a missing card. That doesn't prove that I don't have some weird, rarely-occurring bug, but it's seriously unlikely.

When I get such a report, I pay attention; but I don't immediately start looking for a solution to the problem, because there likely isn't any problem. It would be a waste of my time (and yours, while you wait for me to finish this thing up and ship it). But I do make a note of the report, and keep my eyes peeled for any more reports of similar effects—just in case I'm wrong and the reporter was right.

In the meantime, the report gets classified as "I'm sure you saw something interesting, but I'm not sure you saw what you think you saw." In other words, a sort of UFO report. I now have a small collection of these for the Solitaire Till Dawn betas. If you are one of the people who sent me a report and never saw me mention it again, please don't think I'm ignoring you! I've kept all the reports you've all sent me. But I have to decide where my time is best spent, and if your report looks like a UFO to me, I'm taking a bet that it's not worth my time to investigate it deeply.

So, when...?
When will you be able to buy a real copy? I still don't know. If I can get a handle on the crasher bug in the next couple of weeks, you can bet I will be trying to squash that one before we ship. If not, it will still take me a while to clean up from the beta testing and get all the legal stuff ready; and then it will likely take Apple anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to approve Solitaire Till Dawn for the App Store after I submit it.

But I certainly hope and intend to have it available well before Christmas.

Watch this space!

Beta 21

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 21 is now available for download from our Beta Program page.

Snow Leopard Fix
This release is a quick fix for a show-stopper bug under Snow Leopard. In yesterday's b20 release any attempt to start a new game would result in a blank window.

Beta 20
The b20 version was released only yesterday If you missed it, see the Beta 20 blog post for a description of what was fixed, and what important bugs remain to be fixed.

Crashing Bugs
We know that there are still one or two crashing bugs left to fix. They are rare, but all crashes are important and we're eager to fix these problems. The trouble is, we don't know how to cause them! We know that some of you are seeing these crashes, but we can't make them happen on our own machines, and that makes it difficult to diagnose and fix the problem.

One of you has said that dragging a card too far to the left, outside of the actual game window, will cause a crash. We tried it, on each of our systems, multiple times and in different ways; but we never saw a crash.

Another report suggested that a quick right-click, then left-click with the mouse would cause a crash. Again, we have tried it and have not seen any crashes.

Any information that any of you can provide about these crashes will be most welcome. Thanks!

Beta 20

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 20 is now available from our Beta Program page.

What's Not Fixed

There are still a couple of crashing bugs left. Unfortunately I have not been able to reproduce any of them on my own machines yet. If I can't make it happen where I can study it, I probably can't fix it. But I haven't given up yet, and I intend to focus on these issues in the coming week.

There is only one currently-unfixed bug in the public Bug List: Bug ID 82. It's a cosmetic problem that happens only on older systems, and it seems to be an Apple bug. So far I haven't found a workaround for it, but I'll keep after it.

What's Fixed

Bugs 83, 93, and 94 are now fixed. But in addition to the bugs in the public Bug List, I have kept a private, unnumbered list of problems that you testers have mostly not noticed.

A lot of these unnumbered bugs are minor and/or cosmetic issues: it wouldn't be the end of the world if they weren't fixed. But I want Solitaire Till Dawn to be as smooth an experience as possible, so for b20 I put some time in on these little issues. I won't list all the changes here; there's a full list in the Read Me file for b20. Here are a few of the more important and/or noticeable ones:

Baker's Game: Many of you reported that Baker's Game gives a lot of false you-are-stuck notifications. That's fixed; I'm pretty sure now that if Baker's Game thinks you're stuck, you really are.

Readability: In response to quite a few requests, the numbers on the deck are now larger and easier to read.

Timed Games: Your "average time" in the All Statistics window was being calculated incorrectly, and has been fixed. Games that last longer than an hour now display the time in hours, minutes, and seconds instead of just minutes and seconds.

Animations: Wins are now reported after the winning move has finished animating, instead of instantly when you click the winning card. The fade-out-and-in animation on New Game has been improved, and should look more smooth now. Changes in window size are now animated, although I have to say that it isn't too smooth. (This seems to be true for Apple apps as well as for Solitaire Till Dawn, though.) The Game Drawer now slides in and out more smoothly.

Tour: The Solitaire Till Dawn Tour has been reworked. There are a couple of new pages covering preferences and keyboard shortcuts; the images in the Tour window are now larger and more clear; and there are retina versions of all of the images. The Tour window is now located near the upper-right of the game window, to avoid covering or being covered by the All Statistics window, the Game Info panel, or the Game Drawer.