Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.02

We finally finished this extensive technical update.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.0Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.0 has now been released by Goodsol Development.  It is available for immediate download/purchase for only $24.95, and a trial version is also available.

This version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition contains 550 games (50 more than the previous version), and the full version provides access to another 75 bonus games.  The interface also contains many user interface improvements.

From a technical perspective, this is a major upgrade, as it represents a complete conversion of the program from Carbon libraries (used since version 1.0) to Cocoa frameworks, an effort imposed by Apple’s diminishing support for the former.  In the process, numerous features were reconsidered and reimplemented, so there are various improvements throughout the program.  One thing that we lost in the process was support for (much) older versions of Mac OS X; the current version requires Snow Leopard (10.6).

What happened to 3.00 and 3.01?

As is often the case with major technical changes, there were a couple of teething problems.  In the first release (3.00), we discovered a race problem with the Cocoa system, where 5-10% of our users had systems that were sending messages to objects that had already been disposed, causing the program to crash when run on these systems.  (Of course, none of the test systems exhibited this problem.)

The second release (3.01), as well as the first, was discovered to have a critical error with menu handling, namely, that card sets could not be switched (properly) using the ‘Preferences->Card Set’ menu.  Unlike the first issue, this one was always reproducible, missed entirely by our testers, and completely my fault.  Oops… 🙂

Once the current version proves stable, we will be adding quite a few (probably 25) more new games and making more interface improvements, including the most requested feature, an ability to sort results and high score tables.  This, of course, will be a free upgrade for all then current PGSME customers, so buy now!

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