The next version of our Mac Edition is now available.

Goodsol 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!

We finally finished this extensive technical update.

Pretty 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!