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.

Beta 19

Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 19 is now available from our Beta Program page.

This release fixes two more situations in which a crash or freeze could occur during normal play.

There may still be an unfixed crashing bug. I can't be certain because it is getting harder to reliably cause a crash to happen; and if I can't make a crash happen in my testing, of course I can't tell whether whether I've fixed it. If you see a crash in b19, please do let me know, and please send along the crash report. (To send a crash report, copy all that text out of the crash window and paste it into your bug report. Thanks!)

In addition, b19 fixes two occurrences of the "blank white card" bug (one of which only happened with Apple's as-yet-unreleased Yosemite version of OS X); and it takes extra care to restore the mouse cursor to the proper pointer shape when you return the mouse to the game area; and it makes some minor cosmetic improvements to the status bar, including a larger and more noticeable "big red X" to mark a stuck game.

Expiration Dates
By now most of you are familiar with the way each beta will expire on a given date. If you're wondering why, there are two simple reasons. The first is that I don't want to continue receiving bug reports for bugs in old betas that have already been fixed in later betas; that would waste far too much of my time (and yours). The second reason, obviously, is that I will be selling Solitaire Till Dawn for money when it's ready, so I don't want to leave working, cost-free copies out in the world.

But we have some new participants in this beta program, so I'd like to make two points clear to everyone:

• When the finished version is available for purchase, it will not have an expiration date.
• Until the finished version is available for purchase, I will continue to make time-limited free versions available.

So you won't have to do without Solitaire Till Dawn, even when I'm done fixing bugs; there won't be any interruption of solitaire service!

Yosemite

A reminder: Solitaire Till Dawn BETA 18 is now available from our Beta Program page. See the previous post for details.

Yosemite
Apple this week announced Mac OS X 10.10, named "Yosemite". The release is scheduled for sometime this fall, but Apple has made a beta version available to developers. Of course we all want Solitaire Till Dawn to work with the latest Apple software, so I have installed the Yosemite beta on a spare partition, and begun testing Solitaire Till Dawn b18 on Yosemite.

The Good News
It mostly works. You can definitely sit right down and play your favorite game. Although I haven't had time yet for comprehensive testing, all features seem to be basically working.

The Bad News
I have found a couple of obvious bugs. I've added them to the bug list. (To see Yosemite-specific bugs, visit the Bug List page and search for Yosemite.) I'm also going to describe them here for you because I don't want a flood of bug reports telling me things I already know. Here they are:

Bug 89: Phantom Dragged Card
Update: I've got this one fixed for b19. When dragging a card, a blank white card will appear and chase along behind the card or cards you're dragging. If you pause while dragging, it will catch up and disappear behind the dragged cards, only to reappear and resume chasing when you resume dragging. It will disappear when you drop the dragged cards.

Bug 90: Gray Text in the Status Bar
The text should be black, of course.

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 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.