Finally, Solitaire Till Dawn

A while back, when I realized that most followers of this blog were more interested in the progress of Solitaire Till Dawn rather than anything in my personal life, I created a new blog for my solitaire development and stopped posting about Solitaire Till Dawn here. Since then, nothing very noteworthy has happened to me other than solitaire development, so I haven't been posting here at all!

I'm going to break that rule now, because Solitaire Till Dawn is finally available in the App Store, and this is a personal achievement for me. It is the culmination of over five years of work, rewriting Solitaire Till Dawn from the ground up for modern Macs. Apple released the Lion version of OS X in 2011, and until yesterday that meant that you couldn't run Solitaire Till Dawn on any Mac with an up-to-date OS. Now you can: the new release is good for any Mac OS from Snow Leopard (10.6) up through the latest Yosemite (10.10).

It's been a long grind. The previous version of Solitaire Till Dawn was the result of 15 years of steady development; you can't re-create something like that in a weekend. And I was slowed at first by the requirements of my day job, and later by the exigencies of moving house to a new state. But for the past year or more I've been able to give it lots of attention, and we've finally reached the big milestone: the release of version 1.0.

The first version of Solitaire Till Dawn was released in 1991, at about the same time that the Internet was being created. It ran on the Mac Plus, as well as the Mac II (the first Mac with a color monitor). If you're interested, I put an article about the app's history on the Semicolon LLC website: The History of Solitaire Till Dawn. (I've also completely redesigned the website. Go admire it!)

In one way, I feel as though I'm owed a vacation now. But it doesn't really work like that, and anyway I don't want one. Once the dust from the initial release has settled, I will be adding new features and fixing any bugs that turn up, and putting out upgrades. And I hope to begin work on an iPad version soon, although I'm making no promises about that for now!

I'll make one plea here: if you decide to buy a copy, please leave an honest review and rating at the App Store. That will help sales if the review is good, and help me make improvements if it isn't. Thanks!