Category Archives: Products

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.01

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A update to our best-selling card solitaire game for the Mac is available.

Goodsol Development published Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.01, a maintenance update to PGSME 2.0 announced here.

This version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition fixes about a dozen (i.e., all) bugs reported since the initial release, and also makes a few changes designed to improve ease of use and, thereby, reduce the number of customer support inquiries. In particular, many users did not understand the Climb Mode feature at all, much to my personal dismay, so it is no longer the default.

The most important bug fix in this version, and the one that took the longest time to find and track down, was an interface race condition which could allow code to be unexpectedly reentered, sometimes causing a crash or, more often, just creating illegal positions. The nature of the bug meant that some (most?) players would never experience a problem, but a few managed to trigger the error on a regular basis. Imagine clicking to redeal a waste pile back to the stock and then attempting to redeal from the stock during this process. Unfortunately, “Patience is a Virtue” was not an adequate response.

After the initial release, Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.0 was a hit in the Top Apple Downloads, rising to #2 Most Popular in the Cards & Puzzles category (and still in the top 20 as I write this). It also flirted with the Top 5 overall in the general Games category, peaking at around #6. This is only the tip of the iceberg, though, as the upcoming PGSME version 2.1 will have 200 games, up from 101 in the current version.

Onward and upward…

Goodsol Solitaire 101 version 1.01

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A maintenance update to our latest Windows solitaire game is released.

Goodsol Development has now published Goodsol Solitaire 101 version 1.01, an update to the initial version of GS101, which was released last November [2009]. (Internally, I refer to the product as GSCI to avoid confusing naming such as GS101101.) This version fixes a number of bugs that were discovered since the original release.

What makes this release interesting is that it shares its game data file with our Mac product, Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.0, and both games are based on common source code, so several of the bugs that were fixed were originally discovered during beta testing for PGSME 2.0, and then confirmed and resolved on GS101. Of the various arguments I have heard for cross-platform development, additional testing of the fundamental program logic (on each system) was not mentioned, so this was a welcome surprise. It should only benefit the quality of both products.

For more information on the game, please visit the Goodsol Solitaire 101 web site, or just download the program and give it a try. This update is free to all customers who have already purchased GS101.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.0

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The next version of our card solitaire game for Mac OS X is now available.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.0 has been published by Goodsol Development. This solitaire program includes 101 games (up from 30 in version 1.01), plus 34 bonus variants in the full (purchased) version. It also adds some features, including the introduction of Climb Mode. For more information on the basic features, see the screenshot tour.

This version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition is a major technological upgrade from the previous versions, now being based on our Goodsol Solitaire Engine, which is a cross-platform, data-driven game engine that has been the focus of our development over the last year or more. Although more improvements are still planned, the basic functionality of this engine has already been proven, and it will allow us to produce upgrades and expansions more quickly and easily.

Climb Mode is a feature where deals for a particular game are played in numerical order, with a fixed set of rules, for a cumulative game score. This feature was implemented originally as a solution to online statistics manipulation, but it has evolved into a good competition, especially in the card solitaire games. With the addition of Climb Mode and the supported 101 games, PGSME 2.0 is the Mac OS X equivalent of Goodsol Solitaire 101 on Windows, and they share online high score tables.

Because of the (overly?) generous upgrade policy, Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.0 is free to all customers who purchased PGSME 1.0. If you have not purchased yet (why not?), it is available for $24.95 (plus $7.50 if you want it on CD) here.

One down, two to go! (See the second item in our company goals for 2009.)

Goodsol Solitaire 101

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A new solitaire game is released!

This week, Goodsol Development has released Goodsol Solitaire 101, a new solitaire game with (surprise!) 101 different solitaire variants to play. A 30-day trial version of Goodsol Solitaire 101 is ready to download here [6.7M]. The full version is only $19.95 and includes 34 bonus games and the ability to submit high scores online. As one may have have assumed, our company, SophSoft, Incorporated, did most of the development, and I (personally) did all of the programming.

Although the number of games puts this product squarely between Most Popular Solitaire, with 30 games (all included in GS101), and Pretty Good Solitaire, with 700 games (including all of the GS101 variants), this game provides features not available in either of those titles. In particular, Goodsol Solitaire 101 is the first card game to feature climb mode, which allows players to compete and compare scores with others on an even playing field. More generally, GS101 incorporates all of the better features of both of its aforementioned siblings.

On the technical side, Goodsol Solitaire 101 is a major innovation. The game is based on a new internal engine that is (just about) cross-platform, and the rules for each solitaire game are (almost) entirely data-driven. We can now produce new titles, for both Windows and (soon) Mac OS X, by altering only two source files and changing the supplied resources, and the inevitable bugs will be fixed on all related products simultaneously. However, the user experience is similar to (and better than) those of the existing Goodsol products. It took a relatively long time to get this engine done correctly, but now we expect to reap the benefits.

This is just the beginning of what should be a number of regular product announcements over the coming months (and years), seasoning all of the other posts on this blog. Stay tuned…

Most Popular Solitaire 1.12

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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.