Coming in 2016

It's a new year 2016 (ok, it is nearly 3 weeks old now).

What are we going to be doing at Goodsol in 2016?

Mainly, Windows 10.

Windows 10 is out and it looks successful to me.  In the past month, of the visitors to Goodsol.com running Windows, 42% were already running Windows 10.  34% were running Windows 7, 15% were on Windows 8.1, 5% were on Windows XP, and 3% were running Windows Vista.  Almost no one is running Windows 8.0 anymore.  And then there were those 15 people running Windows 98 (congratulations, maybe it's time for new computer?).  It is pretty remarkable for a new version of Windows to be the most popular version after only 6 months.

The first big Goodsol event of 2016 will be version 16 of Pretty Good Solitaire for Windows, which is coming in just a couple of weeks.  Version 16 will have 20 new games for a total of 900 games.  That will actually be the largest number of new games in a single new version of Pretty Good Solitaire for Windows since 2007 (which, perhaps not coincidentally, is when the Mac version of Pretty Good Solitaire first came out).

But even though the new games alone make this the biggest new release in nearly a decade, there is much more.  There will be 2 new larger card sizes in version 16 for very large resolution screens.  These new card sizes for screens of resolutions of 1600x1200 or higher, which is true on many new monitors or Windows 10 devices.  In addition, many of the game screens, especially the game winning screen and the statistics screen, have been made larger.  The entire Favorites system was redone, so now you can delete a game from Favorites from inside the game as well as add it.  And there are many more little changes.

Version 16.0 is the version of Pretty Good Solitaire developed in Windows 10, so many of the changes are designed to make the game look better or run better on Windows 10.  But for those 5% of you still on Windows XP, don't worry, the game will still work on Windows XP (and Vista, 8, 8.1, and of course the still very popular Windows 7).  We won't be giving up Windows XP compatibility soon, but given that there are no more security updates for it people should be moving to a newer system soon anyway.

But going forward it is clear that Windows 10 is the future and building out new versions of our games for Windows 10 will be our focus in 2016.  There will still be updates to the Mac and iPad versions (in fact one is in the works), but Windows 10 is our priority this year.

There have been a lot of talk about the privacy issues of Windows 10 and I've tweeted a lot of articles about them on my twitter account @goodsolitaire.  The fact is that you can turn off pretty much everything if you want to, here is a good guide on how to get started changing the privacy settings in Windows 10.

Look for the new version 16.0 of Pretty Good Solitaire for Windows in early February!

 

Comments

[Maria Lawrie]

I love playing solitaire when I need to think but I only have Apple products do I look forward to hearing about those updates.

[Jean Shaw]

I have been playing your solitaire since wins 95 now i have upgrades again to wins 10 so look forward to hearing from you n the near
future
83yrs young
jJean Shaw

[Jason Andrews]

I'm looking forward to what the 20 games will be before they come to the Mac.