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Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Okay, I think I have my zoo habit under control now - but my ipod has become a portable solitaire machine. The trick is to keep it from taking over my life (and to avoid getting paranoid about it - I don't really think the sevens have it in for me). I have, however, already discovered two problems with the programming:

1) No satisfying woosh as you finally get all your cards face-up. Many solitaire programs provide more payoff than just "We have a winner!" by giving the player the satisfaction of seeing the cards all put themselves away, stacked up neatly on the aces. That's a great feeling, and the ipod version doesn't do it for you. You have to do all the final heavy-lifting yourself, tediously moving all the face-up cards to their spots on the aces.

It does, however, reshuffle/deal very very fast which is greatly appreciated by those of us who give up in a fit of pique if we get stuck.

2) An actual programming bug, not just a user-interface complaint. If you end up with - say, a 3 of hearts stacked face-up on top of a face-down 4 of spades you can tell without actually turning the face-down card over. When you "pick up" a face-up card you can only move the cursor to the cards which "fit" the card you just picked up. In order to say never-mind and put the face-up card back down again, you have to click on that face-up card, not on the place it was to begin with. But if the place it started is actually a viable play (if only the card were face-up) then the cursor shows that as a viable play. Does that make sense? Probably not. Now you know why I'm not getting paid to do QA for games. I can find the problems, but communicating them can be a problem sometimes.

1 Comments:

  • I don't know if you have a PC or a MAC at this point... but for a solitaire game on MAC OS X check out (if you have one) Lavacat Software's version. (lavacat.com).

    It puts on a show when you win. (maybe if you beg them they (apple) will make one for iPod? )

    By jenny, at 10:34 PM  

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