Pretty Good Solitaire Mini 1.10

The best iPhone Solitaire game on the market just got even better.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mini icon

Pretty Good Solitaire Mini (for iPhone) has been updated to version 1.10, which is now available on the App Store for the unbelievably affordable price of only $1.99 US. This is the best Solitaire software value to be found anywhere!

Pretty Good Solitaire Mini 1.10 now contains 800 games, adding 50 new games (and still has 100 bonus games).

In addition to the new games, the entire program has been reworked to support iOS 15, including dark and light modes, and to (continue to) work on the latest iPhone models; all known bugs (most introduced by iOS updates) have been resolved.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mini launch screen

Development

This is the first update of Pretty Good Solitaire Mini ever, since the first version was released almost three years ago, becoming Goodsol Development‘s first (and, thus far, only) iPhone title. That version has a perfect 5.0 rating on the App Store (out of only 12 reviews 🙁 ), and as I write this, the new version is climbing up the charts (according to Apple).

Best Solitaire Game

I have played the Mac, iPad and now iPhone games and this is the best solitaire game out there.

Labtech89 (app store review)

The only real issue with this game is that it is a rip-off… for the publisher and developer. We work hard to make an excellent game, and there is almost no chance that it will ever recoup the cost and effort put into developing and maintaining it. It costs the customer less than a quarter cent per game, and still not enough people are buying it to justify maintenance.

Nevertheless, we continue to do so. Of course, after this amount of time, it is no surprise that Apple has completely rejiggered the internals of the iOS operating system, including the eliminating of the concept of screen orientation entirely, so there was plenty to update to resolve problems created by their aggressive (and unnecessary) deprecation.

You can read about most of these issues in my post from about a year ago, Pretty Good Solitaire Touch Edition 1.60, where I detailed how I first dealt with these (same) issues. For the iPhone version of the Goodsol Solitaire Engine, when compared to that iPad version of GSE, the engine (i.e., model) code is identical (as it also is on Windows and Mac); that is its whole point. The controller code is very similar, but requires a review of all changes, rather than a wholesale code replacement, but that was much less effort than it could have been.

The view code, however, is very dissimilar. On the iPad version (i.e., Touch Edition), the interface consists of key screens and several popover views. On the iPhone version (internally, Phone Edition), a smaller screen and no popover support requires that the interface is constructed in a different manner, with only two main views, supported by 3 tab bars and 10 various tab views. While the low level code to display images, fill tables, and whatnot, is nearly identical, all of the surrounding view code is incompatible, and it was much of this code that was affected by the deprecation. The best we could do was establish certain templates for the types of changes that had been necessary in PGSTE and use those to both identify places where changes were likely necessary and guide us in making the necessary alterations.

I say “we” and “us” but, of course, I am the only programmer working on either of these products, which fact, frankly, probably makes it a little easier to coordinate, though all of the programming work (and a lot of testing) falls to me.

There were a couple of minor positives to this development process. First, the bugs I accidentally introduced in PGSTE 1.60 had been fixed in PGSTE 1.61, so they never entered the code base for this update in the first place. Second, the fact that the iPhone version necessarily has no popover support means that we completely avoided the double deprecation problem that we experienced with the iPad version development.

The most amusing item was that just prior to development on this update commencing (and after its originally planned start date), hence about 2.5 years after the last release, Apkmonk Blog did a very nice review of Pretty Good Solitaire Mini. Right up front, the very first screenshot is (embarrassingly) a background missing the intended game preview. The writer actually (unknowingly) makes lemonade out of this bug: “Don’t worry about the plain look of the app when you first open it“. They go on to give a very nice review (with the odd factual mistake here or there) and rate the game 5 stars (out of 5).

Now what really happened is that the game worked perfectly when released, showing a game preview image on that first (“plain”) page, or a splash image if no game is currently selected. Then, as so often happens, Apple makes unnecessary changes to iOS and breaks things. In this case, it changed the process for initializing a view and its subviews in a way that broke the code we were using to show these preview images (and a few minor images elsewhere).

Specifically, what happened was that Apple made changes to the layer objects of general views after the viewDidLoad method was called. Our previews were not image views (deliberately), and in that method we initialized the contents of the layer object associated with the subview, resulting, as expected, in the preview images displaying properly. When a later version of iOS changed the way that (and when) Apple did this initialization, the preview images stopped displaying. In the end, we had to convert to image views and implement our other behavior on those. It looks like Apple introduced a bug into their system, and though they could argue (illegitimately) that we were not using a sanctioned method, the fact remains that they should not have been messing with view initialization in this way in the first place!

January release: check. 🙂

Pretty Good Solitaire Touch Edition 1.60

We have updated the BEST iPad Solitaire game on the market.

Pretty Good Solitaire for iPad

Pretty Good Solitaire for iPad has been updated to version 1.60, which is now available on the App Store for the extraordinarily reasonable price of only $9.99 US.

Pretty Good Solitaire Touch Edition 1.60 now contains 750 games, adding 50 new games, as well as 10 new bonus games (for a total of 100 bonus games).

In addition to the new games, the entire program has been reworked to support the latest iPad models and iOS versions, including dark and light modes, and all known bugs (most introduced by iOS updates) have been resolved.

Development

This is the first update of Pretty Good Solitaire Touch Edition in almost four years. To be honest, the game does not sell nearly well enough to justify spending a lot of time updating, although it is clearly the best Solitaire game available for the iPad. It has had 700 games for all that time, which meant that it was probably the best Solitaire value available.

Historically, Apple released iOS 10 during the development process for the previous version, and it did not make sense at the time to rework the entire engine to adjust to the latest SDK, so we released the product as originally intended. However, in the years since that version, four more major versions of iOS were released, each adding (few) new features but deprecating loads of methods, so without any intervening updates, the performance of the product deteriorated slightly, including (quickly) problems with the pile popovers, some issues with orientation changes, and (most recently) some game preview images not drawing.

Among the victims of Apple’s ruthless deprecation were nicely sized launch images (forced to use less capable launch storyboards instead), previous popover behavior and its subsequent replacement (yes, double deprecation, proving the level of aggression), UIAlertView and UIActionSheet classes (both in favor of UIAlertController), the CFGregorianDate class (too convenient, I guess), bordered toolbar buttons (UIBarButtonItemStyleBordered), methods of launching and dismissing modal views, and the entire concept of orientation changes (an inherent aspect of tablet and phone usage).

The image bug was the result of a poorly redesigned image view class, for which I found a workaround, and there are also a large number of spurious log errors generated by internal Apple processes that cannot be easily fixed or suppressed (with precision) by developers. The page curl transition was apparently completely broken as of iOS 13 (and/or the iOS 14 SDK), but that was just a cutesy feature I had already decided to change anyway. The redesign of the controls, compounded with the addition of light and dark modes (to be fair, a decent iOS feature), made several of our views difficult to use under certain circumstances. All of this created a great deal more work than was originally envisioned for this update.

The product has 4 popover views, and associated control classes, which all needed to be completely reworked, as well as 2 more views that used controls affected by the recent redesign or dark/light mode setting. Alert views were used in a variety of places, as were action sheets, plus there were several other locations where code had to be reworked due to deprecation; changes due to the loss of a Gregorian calendar class (to a generic calendar that requires an extra layer or two of indirection) were particularly pervasive, as it was used in several places in the code.

Oh, yeah, lest we forget… the latest version of the iOS Simulator has a particularly egregious bug in which it will not play audio in any version prior to iOS 14.0 and instead (the worst part) introduces a timeout delay of approximately 15 seconds for every attempt to do so. I had to disable the audio when running in the Simulator on unsupported versions just to continue. With all of the new models of iPad (with different resolutions and aspect ratios) and 5 more versions of iOS to test (well, really just 4, because the Simulator no longer supports iOS 10), just finding a representative subset of devices and iOS versions was a chore.

Nevertheless, I managed to get all of this done, and compared with that work, adding the new games and updated engine code was a (relative) breeze. The only concern at all going forward is the reported deprecation of the UIWebView class, which we use for game rules and credits, but because there is no replacement for all of the iOS versions we support, and using two different view classes is untenable for this case, not to mention that there are no deprecation warnings during compilation, we chose to leave that (working) code alone. All known bugs were fixed, the interface and animations were improved, and everything seemed to be working perfectly.

My Mistake

The update has now been live for a little more than a week, and despite how solid the product felt (and still feels) to me, there were a number of bugs reported quickly. When distilled, it actually appears to be just 2 minor bugs.

The first bug appears to be a problem with random number seeding for the ‘Random’ deal button, where the same deal numbers now come up in the same order. While the exact cause has not yet been determined, the precipitating cause was almost certainly the calendar deprecation. Time seconds were used to seed the random number generator, and because that would now take extra code, I replaced the seed with the system time reference, which (in theory) changes at the same rate, resulting in less code. Apparently, somehow it must have resulted in non-working code, although the cause was not obvious from inspecting the method.

The second bug was my bigger mistake, and requires some history.

The previous version had a legitimate bug in the game results code. Results are stored in a database with a validation code (based partially on date and time) to insure integrity. When the original iOS port of the engine was written, this code was inadvertently using local time, rather than a fixed time based on UTC or something similar. The effect was that results earned in one time zone may not appear valid in another.

The solution going forward, of course, was to fix that bug by getting the UTC time instead of local (and, coincidentally, that code all had to be rewritten anyway because of the calendar deprecation). However, that change alone would invalidate all previous results, which is not desirable at all. Since all previous results would have a valid code in (some) local time, I decided to simply replace the old codes with the newer ones. Because it would be tedious, slow, and potentially inaccurate to check all time zones, I decided to only replace codes that validate in the current time zone, figuring that those few users (including myself, actually) who had invalid codes because, for instance, they played the game in both California and Michigan 😉, could just manually set the other time zone(s) temporarily (or visit the other time zone organically) and let those results correct themselves.

So the implemented logic was that any result failing a current validation check was then checked against the old method using local time, and if that validated, the code would be updated. Note also that I limited this correction behavior to results purported to be in 2020 or earlier, when I still expected the update to be released last year. (Do you see the logical flaw in my thinking here?) In theory, this should be fairly straightforward, but testing it was challenging, because once fixed, the results stayed fixed.

In the simulator, I tested a small sample of results, and everything worked flawlessly. Then, I went to a physical device where I had built up a collection of around 50 results in one game just testing this development version (prior to the validation code fix) and it worked perfectly and transparently. I had legitimate results, then after the UTC fix, they all appeared invalid, then after adding the correction code, they were just back to normal.

Then we released the update. I had a bit of trepidation, because I had my 5000 games of Lower 48 that had loads of invalid results peppered throughout. (That was my “go to” game for waiting… doctor visits, airports and airplanes, a brief unhappy stay in hospital, etc.) I should point out that because I do the development work as SophSoft, Incorporated, but deliver the source code to Goodsol Development, who actually publish the game, the products are considered different (with incompatible signatures), so I cannot test my live data from App Store downloads on development versions.

I downloaded my update from the App Store even before the publisher told me it had been submitted and anxiously brought up Lower 48, which showed 5000 games played but only four thousand and some won (when I have, in fact, won every single deal). I opened up the game action popover with the results list and… Well, it worked, eventually bringing my results to the correct 100% win rate, but not perfectly, for I had not really considered the effect of that many writes to the database; it took a period of several seconds, several unresponsive seconds, before the fixes were done.

This seemed minor, at first. However, we have some devoted fans, and the first report of problems came from somebody who has played a favorite game more than 110,000 times! My several seconds, when I knew what was happening, multiplied by more than a score for somebody who was just trying to play a game, looks a heck of a lot like a lockup. Fortunately, it only has to happen once (per game) and that user is now back to happily playing Russian Solitaire. I have to hope that somebody who has played one particular game that many times does not have too many games with that much activity.

For fun, I just calculated that playing every game in Pretty Good Solitaire for iPad that many times, assuming you could average one minute per game, would take more than 175 years playing around the clock. Of course, with a more realistic average of 10 minutes per game, my 5000 games of Lower 48 would be the equivalent of more than 20 weeks of full-time work!

Anyway, with a couple of simple miscalculations, I managed to make life a little more interesting for the customer support people. Sorry about that. 😔

January release: check.

happiness
productivity

AWESOME Solitaire AR

Digital Gamecraft™ is delighted to announce its latest development project, AWESOME Solitaire AR Edition™, shipping in July.

You have known us as the development force behind the award-winning, best-selling, and most numerous Solitaire games, Pretty Good Solitaire, Goodsol Solitaire 101, Most Popular Solitaire, FreeCell Plus, and A Little Solitaire for iPad (to name a few).

Today, we announce the upcoming availability of AWESOME Solitaire AR Edition™, the world’s first augmented reality Solitaire product shipped with its own AR hardware.

Imagine being able to take all your favorite solitaire games with you wherever you go.  Play FreeCell on the wall of a building.  Find your Spider moves spread out over a city block.  Meet people on the street and explain to them that, “The game is called ‘Klondike‘ and, yes, there are many different types of solitaire.”  See the cards right out in front of you, almost as if they could be real, physical objects.

Best of all, AWESOME Solitaire AR Edition will come with premium augmented reality hardware from our friends at DAQRI, which hardware you can also use for, you know, other stuff (when not playing solitaire, of course).

Unique Features

  • includes hundreds of types of solitaire, complete with rules on how to play
  • ability to select virtually any size playing cards and tableaux up to 1 mile wide
  • play multiplayer mode and fight strangers for the cards you need to win
  • choose between two hardware configurations based on quality of neighborhood
  • ships with special “decks” of 52 cards each for low power desktop operation

Prices

Professional system, includes AWESOME Solitaire AR Edition software, DAQRI Smart Glasses, and two decks of standard playing cards – $7495

Even more professional system, includes AWESOME Solitaire AR Edition, DAQRI Smart Helmet, and 4 decks of Poker size playing cards – $call for price

Solitaire gang discount on fleet purchases – call for details

Preorder now!  Due to anticipated overwhelming demand, orders will be shipped on a first-come, first-served basis, so reserve your place in line today.

 

Pretty Good Solitaire ME 3.30

The latest upgrade to our flagship macOS product is available.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.3Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.30, available from Goodsol Development, is the best Solitaire game for Mac computers.  This version of the game can be purchased and immediately downloaded for only $24.95, and it is a free upgrade for customers.

This Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition update adds another 100 games, for a total of 700 games, plus another 90 bonus games not accessible in the trial version (for those who want to try it first).

In addition to the new games, this version 3.30 update addresses several minor requests from customers, fixes all known bugs, and fully supports Apple macOS Sierra.

Fifteen Years with Goodsol

We have been working with Goodsol Development for 15 years now!

Goodsol DevelopmentOn this date back in 2001, SophSoft, Incorporated made our first software delivery to Goodsol Development.  Since that time, we have never stopped working together, producing the best solitaire software ever created.

I posted about this collaboration 5 years ago in my post, 10 Years of the GDcard Library.  We have continued our progress since then, adding an entire line of iOS products and 400 more games to Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition, along with much more.

For fun, I thought that I would take a look at some of the numbers:

To save everybody a little bit of math, this means that, on average, we have delivered a new product version once every 10 days, and we have added a new game of Solitaire every two days, for the entire 15 years.  Amazingly, the number of delivered versions for Pretty Good MahJongg and for Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition are currently exactly the same: 88 of each.  [Spoiler: PGMJ will take the lead with a macOS Sierra bug fix.]

In lieu of anniversary gifts 🙂 , just tell your friends about our excellent products!

Pretty Good Solitaire ME 3.10

The next version of our Mac Edition is now available.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.1Goodsol Development has released Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.10.  This is a free upgrade for customers who have already purchased, it is available for immediate purchase for only $24.95, and a trial version is also available.

This version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition adds another 25 games, for a total of 575 games, and the full version has 75 bonus games.  The main menu interface was also changed to make the game search/filter box easier to find and use.

The 25 new games in PGSME 3.1 are:

  • Acey and Kingsley
  • Anno Domini
  • Assembly
  • Box Fan
  • Cell 11
  • Crescent Fan
  • Double Aces and Kings
  • Five Stacks
  • Forwards
  • Forwards and Backwards
  • Free Parking
  • Grandmother’s
  • Idle Aces
  • Lucky Thirteen
  • Maze
  • Pyramid Clear
  • Quadruple Russian
  • Racing Aces
  • Red Hand
  • Ripple Fan
  • Solid Square
  • Spaces and Aces
  • Speculation
  • Twin Queens
  • Unusual

Goodsol Community

Along with this release, Goodsol has now created two new places to discuss Solitaire games in social media, to supplement the Goodsol Forum.  The first is the (quite active) Goodsol Solitaire Community on Google+, and the other is the Goodsol Solitaire Group on Facebook.  These are great places to get help with a specific deal number for one of our games, to find a challenging deal number (and maybe help somebody else), to get recommendations for games, or to discuss Solitaire topics in general.

The next version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition will contain 600 games, but you can buy now, have fun right away, and still get that version as a free upgrade!

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!

Solitaire

I come by my love of Solitaire honestly.

It is fair to say that I am one of the leading experts in the type of card game known as Solitaire (in the US), or Patience (in the UK and elsewhere).  I have been working with Thomas Warfield at Goodsol Development for more than a dozen years, and in that capacity I have implemented literally hundreds of different Solitaire games on various platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, and iPad.

However, one would be very mistaken to assume that I had to learn about Solitaire back then, or even that these were my first Solitaire software products.  In fact, I have been a Solitaire enthusiast for more than 40 years (easily predating my first access to a computer), and I have been writing programs for playing Solitaire for 30 years.  That is why it was such a good match when Thomas and I started working together; he is also a renown expert, with a very successful Solitaire game, Pretty Good Solitaire, and there is not another company on the planet with more Solitaire expertise from which to draw.

I first learned to play Solitaire from my father when I was about 5 years old.  He taught me a traditional form of Klondike (which many people just call, “Solitaire”), and I clearly remember the first time he watched me deal out the tableau on the stone hearth in front of our fireplace.  I played that a lot over the years, as well as a few other games I picked up.  My neighbor taught me Pyramid, which I really liked, and “Clock” (PGS: Travellers Clock), which had an appeal due to the elegance of play and the physicality of the the cards, but got boring quickly because of the lack of choice.  My mother taught me “Idiot’s Delight” (a name used to describe many different Solitaire games), which in this case was a purely mechanical version of Aces Up.  When I was sick, rather than comic books, I just wanted a couple decks of playing cards and, perhaps, some word search puzzles. 🙂

In the early years of elementary school, I had a couple of friends with whom I had discussions (and disagreements) about the rules of Klondike.  We spent time debating whether one should be able to build Aces to the tableau and, if so, whether Kings could be built on Aces, whether one was allowed to pull cards from the foundations (which I now know is called “winnowing back”), how many cards were dealt from stock to waste, and if there was a limit to redeals.  These are the same kind of game design discussions I still have now as we implement more games.

I also spent a great deal of time working on designing my own solitaire games, the rules of which, alas, were never written down and have been lost forever.  I recall that much of my focus was on small tableau games, those which could be played, ideally, with just one or two piles, making them easier to play in a car.  I also recall at least one with a unique mechanic, based on Go Fish, where the player would declare a selected card, and the play proceeded based on whether (or where?) the nominated rank appeared.  Of course, it is fair to assume that none of my inventions were as compelling as the traditional Solitaire games; otherwise, I probably would still be playing them.

During middle school, an acquaintance (friend of a parent) taught me an unnamed Solitaire game, which had two mechanics I had never seen before: movement of card groups regardless of order (as seen in Yukon) and a “hand” of up to 4 arbitrary cards (like the 4 cells in FreeCell).  This game had a greater degree of calculation and planning, and was less reliant on the luck of the deal, so it was very appealing to me.  Around the same time, I also learned how to do a “bridge” shuffle, so I tried to wear out my hands practicing the two together.  A variant of this game is implemented in PGS as Scorpion Head.

By this time, I was already programming computer games, and the idea of playing Solitaire on a computer was never far away.  My first proper (read: finished 🙂 ) implementation was a text version of Aces Up on my Commodore VIC-20.  The program would shuffle and deal the cards, and one would play with simple keypresses for activating a column (i.e., discarding the top card or moving it into an empty space).  As I recall, my friend and I were the only two who ever actually played this game, but we started wondering about the chances of victory with the implemented rules, so I wrote a computer player that would play a hand using a specific heuristic (n.b., not a comprehensive solution search).  Once debugged, I ran the program overnight and the consistent result was that victory was achieved in just about 5% of the games.  (Clearly, a search would have done better… and taken much longer.)

Many other computer implementations followed.  Our friends showed us a game they called “Canasta Solitaire” (similar to Thirteen Packs, which has nothing in common with Canasta), and at their request, I wrote a version of that for the IBM PC (which, incidentally, became the scene of my biggest computer crash disaster 🙁 ).  I wrote very nice DOS (EGA) versions of Pyramid and other games around 1990, and I was working on the Windows/DirectX versions of the these near the end of that decade, when I also worked (in a non-Solitaire capacity) with MVP Software on some other card game packages.

In 2001 (one suit of years ago), the Goodsol Development years began.  My first project was implementing a comprehensive display library, allowing the original Pretty Good Solitaire [for Windows] more options, including more than 2 decks per game.  The second project was Pretty Good MahJongg, which includes 55 original Solitaire games played with MahJongg tiles, followed by Action Solitaire, including (now) 75 Solitaire games played against the clock, and Most Popular Solitaire, my interpretation on the most popular games in PGS, as well as one (Crazy Quilt) that was the first Goodsol version of that game.  Add Mac and iPad versions of Pretty Good Solitaire and Most Popular Solitaire and a Mac version of Pretty Good MahJongg, as well as other products: Goodsol Solitaire 101 (Windows/Mac/iPad), FreeCell Plus (Windows/Mac/iPad), and A Little Solitaire (iPad).

Counting only Goodsol products (not different SKUs) on each platform (including bonus games), it appears that I have implemented 2639 Solitaire games!  More is definitely yet to come, as Thomas is already up to 840 and counting (with PGS), so I am still trailing by 290 games (on Mac and iPad, as well as an internal Windows project).

Of course, with the implementation of so many games, there is a focus on rules.  Due to my love of Solitaire (and games in general), I began collecting books of Solitaire rules.  The first game I learned from a book and really loved was La Belle Lucie, which I played with the merci (draw) rule, implemented in PGS as Three Shuffles and a Draw.  Since high school, I have amassed around two hundred books of traditional game rules, dozens of which have Solitaire games.  An informal survey of my current bookshelves shows 20 books dedicated solely to Solitaire, dating back as far as 1883 (because my copy of Lady Cadogan’s Illustrated Games of Patience is a reprint of the original 1875 book).

So, while Solitaire may be a simple pastime to most, keep in mind that a few of us really know (and appreciate) these games inside and out.  When you want to buy a computer Solitaire program lovingly crafted by the leading experts in the field…

Pretty Good Solitaire Touch Edition 1.20

The BEST iPad Solitaire game has been improved even more.

Pretty Good Solitaire Touch Edition 1.20Pretty Good Solitaire for iPad has been updated to version 1.20, which is now available from the App Store for the incredibly low price of only $9.99 US!

Pretty Good Solitaire Touch Edition now contains 550 games, hundreds more than any other iPad product available.  These are the games you have come to know and love on Windows and/or the Mac, playable from the comfort of your recliner.  Act now and you will receive an extra 75 bonus games, a total of 625 games, as well as free future upgrades.

In addition to the 50 new solitaire games since the initial release, this upgrade also includes easily selectable favorites, position snapshots, a third card set (Tropical Card Set), and a number of bug fixes to make this app as robust as possible.

Too much honesty…

Just for the readers of my blog, let me lay a little bit of truth on you.  The fact is that developing an extensive app like this for the iPad is very time consuming.  Additionally, the price on the iPad ($9.99 US) is quite low for such a large collection of solitaire games, and Apple does absolutely nothing to promote updates, even ones like this which add major new features and games.  All of these factors are working in combination to jeopardize future work on this project.  As much as we LOVE solitaire, we cannot afford to indefinitely invest time and money into a product that does not provide some positive return.

What can you do?  In order make sure that PGSTE remains viable, you can help us by spreading the word, linking to this post, following Goodsol on Facebook and sharing posts with your friends, and most of all rating and reviewing the app on the App Store.  We have a very loyal core of iPad customers, but if we cannot reach critical mass soon, then we may have no choice but to disappoint them and discontinue the project. 🙁

My favorite game in the latest batch is Lower 48, similar to Forty Thieves, which is almost always winnable, but usually quite challenging.  I have won all of the first 100 deals (so far).

Pretty Good Solitaire Touch Edition 1.0

Our iPad Solitaire game with 500 games is now available.

Pretty Good Solitaire for iPadPretty Good Solitaire for iPad is now available in the App Store for the low price of only $9.99 US.  That is less than 2 pennies per game!

Pretty Good Solitaire Touch Edition contains 500(!) games, which gives you more different ways to play Solitaire on your iPad than any other app.  Just to sweeten the pot, we have included another 70 bonus games, which are variations on included games providing slightly or significantly different challenges.

This is the best iPad Solitaire game, bar none.

There are many nice, new features and, of course, lots of games, which are detailed on the PGSTE web page.  While visiting, you can also check out the new website design at Goodsol.com, which also includes all of our Windows Games and Mac Games.

This Pretty Good Solitaire release is the culmination of years of development effort on the Goodsol Solitaire Engine.  Of course, this does not mean that we are done…  Oh, no!  We have already started beta testing for the second development phase (first updates) on our iPad games, and now the cross pollination among Windows, Mac, and iPad continues, with popular iPad features being added to the engine for Mac and Windows, and the core GSE product for Windows rapidly approaching the 810 games in the flagship game.

When I am not developing games, or playing Demolish! Pairs, I am frequently enjoying Pretty Good Solitaire on my iPad.  Really.