This is our second product release of 2007, with more to come.

On Monday, Goodsol Development released Action Solitaire 1.12, an update to our arcade-style solitaire title. This version actually consolidates two different upgrades into one (which explains why there is no public version 1.11). Neither set of changes adds any new games, but there are still 52 styles of games, fifty-two being a good card game number. A 30-day evaluation version is available for download here.

The first set of changes to the product updated the internal help and marketing screens to use a different style, in line with the new look of the Action Solitaire web site. We also added an exit screen to encourage purchases, as well as some addition limitations on evaluations. These changes are all in line with previous updates to Pretty Good MahJongg (version 2.3) and Most Popular Solitaire. Action Solitaire was selected as the next update out door because it had not been updated since 2005.

The other group of changes for this release were the updates to add full Windows Vista compatibility, as with Pretty Good Solitaire 11.0.1 and two more upcoming product upgrades. This includes a beautiful new Vista icon, courtesy of artist Rick Tumanis, and a new HTML help file. To view some images, and get a little more information, see the recent post on Thomas Warfield‘s blog, A Shareware Life.

Of course, even after testing, very few releases go perfectly smoothly, and this one was not an exception. When I did the final quality assurance check, it turns out that the installer was not properly creating a user desktop icon, but was instead only creating a desktop icon for the administration account used for the install, yet another repercussion of the new Vista UAC (User Account Control) system. It took some tedious back and forth to get a properly working installer, but everything worked out fine in the end. There will almost certainly be a more detailed blog entry soon about this particular issue.