New Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition v3.6 with 800 Games
A new version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition is now available!
This new version adds 50 new games, bringing the total to 800. Among the 50 new games are Agnes Four, Agnes Two, Corona Rush, Indian Thirteen, Pumpkin, Quadruple FreeCell, Triple Australian, Triple Golf, and many more.
The trial version can be downloaded from https://www.goodsol.com/mac
If you have previously ordered, you can download the new version by going to the Internet menu at the top of the screen, select "Download Latest Version". If you purchased from the Mac App Store, this version will be updated in the store soon.
Comments
My copy of PGS was updated via the Apple Mac Store to version 3.6.1
I absolutely hate the change to the top menubar. All the actions have been moved from the left side of the screen to the right.
I've been playing PSG for many many years (It's UI is hard-wired in my brain). I am constantly ending a game by hitting the red button when I meant to undo or redo a move.
Please change the UI back or give us a choice of left or right sided menu!
This change is NOT progress! I'm annoyed!
>My copy of PGS was updated via the Apple Mac Store to version 3.6.1
Thank you for being a customer. Welcome to the forum!
>I absolutely hate the change to the top menubar. All the actions have been moved from the left side of the screen to the right.
I am sorry that you are not pleased with the toolbar change; unfortunately, that interface change was made by Apple, not Goodsol. We simply provide the buttons to appear on the toolbar, but macOS displays them however it wants, and this new arrangement is how toolbars appear in Big Sur.
>I've been playing PSG for many many years (It's UI is hard-wired in my brain). I am constantly ending a game by hitting the red button when I meant to undo or redo a move.
I am not sure which red button you mean, but let me suggest that you take a look at the 'Window->Customize Toolbar...' menu option, which allows you to rearrange the buttons as you desire; you could even remove one (e.g., 'New Game') if you don't want it there.
If you mean the little round red button to close the window, that has been at the far left in previous versions (and, again, there is nothing that Goodsol can do to move it), but if you have autosave on, you should be able to just click the preview window and continue from where you were.
>Please change the UI back or give us a choice of left or right sided menu!
We would certainly look into that if it were possible, but as noted, this is not something that developers can control.
>This change is NOT progress! I'm annoyed!
I understand your frustration; as a developer, I have had to deal with much worse imposed changes from Apple 😐️ just to be able to continue to bring Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition to you.
I hope this helps.
Gregg 🐵
Nice one ! What a comprehensive response.
The screenshot above shows the buttons I am referring to.
In your reply you said: "unfortunately, that interface change was made by Apple, not Goodsol". Can you explain how Apple forces you to place these buttons where they are (I'm a retired programmer so I can understand the code/UI requirements.
I have been using PSG on my Mac since 2013 and this latest update is the first time that these buttons have moved from the left-hand side of the menubar to the right. I don't understand why the position of these buttons is determined by Apple. I have checked a few of my other macOS apps and NONE have their app menu buttons setup this way - look at Safari, an Apple developed app and it has ALL its buttons left justified.
My problem is that hand memory has me mousing the red "close" button when I actually mean to press "Undo", "Redo", etc.
Surely users could be given the option to swap the game/user heading with the buttons.
As I said in my original post, this seems like change for the sake of change; there is no real benefit only annoyance.
I live in hope that this terrible change can be reversed.
Regards,
Peter
Peter, I have a similar bugbear in Windows PGS, The button for New Game is right next to Auto Move. Both my partner and myself used to hit the wrong one on different devices so often that I resorted to putting a small Band-Aid over the offending button. Not the fix I would have preferred but a fix that relieves the frustration nonetheless. 😊
Richard
This is Safari on my MacBook Air running Big Sur. Menu buttons can be placed anywhere you choose.
I don't understand how Apple can do this but then force PGS to place them only on the right.
Looking forward to understand why!
Peter
>In your reply you said: "unfortunately, that interface change was made by Apple, not Goodsol". Can you explain how Apple forces you to place these buttons where they are (I'm a retired programmer so I can understand the code/UI requirements.
In Cocoa, when one creates a toolbar, the system has routines it calls to request lists of toolbar buttons (allowed, default, and selectable), so we create those buttons (including spacing buttons) and return the appropriate lists (which, in our case, are all very similar). Our code does not explicitly draw these buttons nor handle the user interface; it simply responds to callbacks when any button is pressed.
We, literally, did not make any changes to the toolbar for this latest version. The newer SDK (as required by Apple), combined with macOS Big Sur, made the toolbar change.
>I don't understand how Apple can do this ...
Not to be facetious, but Apple products regularly use capabilities not ordinarily available to developers. The most obvious example is the Clock icon on the iPhone, which animates to show the current time, including the sweep of a second hand. Regular developers like us are not able to animate our app icons; it was not until recently that we could (under certain circumstances) even have more than one static icon.
>I live in hope that this terrible change can be reversed.
I am confident that the change will not be reversed, per se, as we also have users who prefer the new toolbar, but we will see if an option is feasible.
>Surely users could be given the option to swap the game/user heading with the buttons.
Your complaint has been heard loud and clear (by both me and Thomas) and discussed internally. I will look further into what can be done.
Honestly, I truly appreciate the feedback and the fact that you are so passionate about our game. It makes the thousands of hours I have spent developing it worthwhile. 🙂
Very good response, Gregg.
I should add that Apple does this *ALL* the time, taking perfectly functioning code and breaking it or changing how it works in their updates. It makes being an Apple developer very frustrating. They do this because they can - nobody runs mission critical software on a Mac.
On the other hand, people run lots of mission critical software on Windows and Microsoft could not get away with this. In fact, you can have code from 1995 that functions exactly the same today as it did in 1995. I know this because Pretty Good Solitaire is running code from 1995 in its innermost areas all the time. Microsoft can't break stuff, but Apple can and does. Apple code written in 1995 was junk many, many years ago, it wouldn't run.
I still laugh at our local Mac store, which runs their store software in a DOS box on Windows running on a Mac.
Ok! Thanks for the replies!
I've just found one of my Mac apps (One Markdown) that has its menu buttons the same as PGS.
My medium term aim is to migrate away from a Mac (my MacBook Air is the last one I will own) and move to doing everything on iOS. In the meantime, it looks like I have to retrain my muscle memory for PGS.
Regards,
Peter
Well, let me modestly recommend Pretty Good Solitaire Touch Edition (for iPad): 😁
https://www.goodsol.com/ipad/pretty-good-solitaire.html
Just downloaded the latest version.
No problems so far (aside from those buttons in the toolbar being moved to the far right)
It is unfortunate about the Toolbar. It's not a perfect solution, but what I did was to customize the Toolbar by adding a "Space" multiple times to the right of the Toolbar, which in turn pushed the buttons to the left. They don't go all the way to the left, but I guess that's making the best of an unfortunate situation.
Good suggestion! Not perfect but better than having the buttons on the right. I can't overcome years and years of muscle memory.
In addition, I am not totally convinced by the explanation given by those above. It just doesn't make sense. Sounds more like "we've done it this way for a change and you just have to put up with it.
There was a suggestion about using the iPad version. Again, I agree, it's much better than the Mac version.
Yes Bastiko. There seems to be an obsession with tinkering with things for no apparent reason. Things that worked perfectly well previously just get modified. In my house the following sentence gets used quite frequently much to Liz's amusement. "Oh for God's sake; someone has been xxxxing about with this since yesterday".
If it aint broken .....
>In addition, I am not totally convinced by the explanation given by those above. It just doesn't make sense. Sounds more like "we've done it this way for a change and you just have to put up with it.
Delicious (if frustrating) irony: Internally, I am often complaining (not the word I first wrote 😉) about Apple's annoying habit of changing things that don't need changing, especially their aggressive deprecation, making me change code that worked perfectly fine, and removing products from the App Store just because they don't use a recent SDK (even though they still work fine). Now, I am the target because of Apple's change.
(On the other hand, the code I wrote to draw cards in Windows just continues to work unmodified; I haven't had to change it at all in at least a decade, maybe even two. 😮 Score another one for Microsoft.)
If you choose not to believe the fact that I never touched the toolbar code for this release, that's disappointing, but nothing I can change.
You may also choose not to believe that I may have found a solution to this toolbar situation but, of course, I may also operate like Tinkerbell. 🧚
😉
Careful Gregg, Tinker Bell was a "sassy fairy". 😄
I didn't mean to offend! I am glad of your efforts in maintaining this app. It just seems odd that an Apple change would have such an effect. I've been an Apple Mac and iPad/iPhone user for decades and never struck such a problem. No other apps I have exhibit this problem.
But if you have a fix; GREAT!!! I look forward to it being implemented.
Regards,
Peter
I just found an app that does exactly the same thing: Finder.
I noticed that in my Finder window, all the icons are pushed over to the right (folder name is now on the left).
Perhaps their indifferent and arrogant attitude will catch up with them. It is reported that Microsoft has just overtaken them as the world's most valuable company. I would have imagined that they would have polled opinions from a group of principal users through the likes of beta testing before making changes so counter-productive, and that appear to have no genuine purpose in the first place. A rotten apple.