This is our third 2007 product release, of several planned.

Yesterday, Goodsol Development released Most Popular Solitaire 1.12, an update to our traditional card solitaire title, which (as the name suggests) includes 30 of the most popular solitaire games of various types. This version is a maintenance update primarily intended to provide better compatibility with Windows Vista. A 30-day evaluation copy can be downloaded here.

Unlike the other major products, the version number is not displayed prominently on the Most Popular Solitaire web site. This title is positioned as a piece of software for players who want to be able to play a fair variety of popular types of solitaire, or patience, without needing the (sometimes overwhelming) variety provided by Pretty Good Solitaire (PGS), which currently has 660 different games, with more on the way.

Although Most Popular Solitaire (MPS) seems to be something akin to “PGS Lite”, under the hood it is actually considerably different from its older, more established, brother. The two games use entirely separate engines that are not even written in the same language. MPS is written entirely in C++ (using Visual Studio 6.0) and was actually based more on the code from Pretty Good MahJongg and Action Solitaire, than from PGS. Still, most of the design was derived from the flagship product, as it should be.

This deep into the Vista update schedule, we finally have most of the glitches worked out, and this release went smoothly, with the first installer build passing muster. I still have a list of Vista lessons learned during this process to share. Next up… Icons.