You can find a ton of solitaire apps out there, but surprisingly few that are native to the Mac and free. If those are your criteria, turn to Solitaire Greatest Hits, which came out in version 2.0 just this month.
The idea for SGH came to developer Daniel Fontaine about about a year ago. “I had recently purchased a Mac and I was looking for a good project to try out some of Apple’s native libraries, particularly Core Animation, which seemed interesting. At the same time, I knew a few people switching over to Mac from a Windows background and, interestingly, their biggest complaint was that they couldn’t find a quality native solitaire implementation that they didn’t have to pay for. So SGH seemed to make a lot of sense – it wasn’t a large project, it seemed to be a good fit for learning Core Animation, and it seemed to fill a hole in many Mac users’ desktop experience. I started the project and wrote most of version 1.0 over a year ago, but I was fairly busy and lost interest in tracking down bugs, so the project just sat around on my computer until this summer, when I decided to clean it up a bit and put it up on SourceForge.net.
“Originally the Greatest Hits were just going to be Klondike, Free Cell, and Spider, since these games ship with Windows and people have just come to expect that they have these games on their computer. However, the new version expands the number of games to 12, because once the basic game infrastructure is in place, it’s easy to add new games. The new version also features unlimited undo/redo, scoring, save/load games, the ability to peek at how many cards are left in the deck, the option to restart the current game from the beginning, auto complete games, and help pages with detailed instructions for all games.”
Fontaine says that in future versions he plans to add a score and stats board that records a player’s all-time best scores and fastest games. But he doesn’t expect to add a lot more different games. “I intend to limit the number of games that are included to less than 15 or so. Many solitaire applications ship with hundreds of different games. I always found it frustrating to open up a new game menu and find myself presented with 300 choices, most of which I had never heard of. I personally prefer to restrict the games to popular classics that people have heard of and can be confident will be fun if they take a few minutes to learn them. Of course, the source code is available, so people are free to add more games if they really want them.”
Fontaine says he tried to imagine what Windows Solitaire might look like if Apple wrote the analogous games and shipped them with the Mac. He wrote the application using XCode and the standard Apple tools.
The next release is likely to fix a small performance issue. “Currently the game’s animation can become a bit choppy on Macs that don’t have particularly powerful graphics cards. A number of people have been justifiably unhappy about this. These performance problems seem to be largely because of the use of Core Animation drop shadows for every card. I expect to address this concern by adding an option to turn off shadows if the animation is choppy.”
Fontaine isn’t sure when that next release will come. “The release schedule will likely be irregular in the future. I work on the project on my own time, and I make releases when I feel the software is ready, so the release schedule will be dependent on how busy I am. I try to fix major bugs within a few days of becoming aware of them, however.”
Speaking of bugs, Fontaine needs more people to do bug testing, and he wouldn’t mind some help with translations into languages other than English. If you want to contribute your time, you can email him.