Eh, it certainly seems excessive, but when you're doing iOS development you end up with a lot of high-resolution images, audio files, and other assets that you can't really justify eliminating.
It's a lot more than the original Solitaire. Games like FreeCell and Spider are baked in, it has daily challenges, Xbox Live integration and achievements, etc. FWIW, the Windows version is larger, 232 MB.
How does one go about getting a listing like this? I am new to iOS and macOS and I'd like to learn. Can I pull the equivalent of a iOS ".apk" file and decompile it like Android?
If you download the iOS application in iTunes, or sync your applications from your device to iTunes, then you can drag the applications out of iTunes onto your desktop. That's an IPA file, which is essentially a zip file following a specific format. Just rename from .ipa to .zip and unzip it. You can now inspect the application's contents.
Microsoft Solitaire Collection has been available on Windows Phone for quite a long time. Actually many of their casual games are available as universal apps on Windows 10 desktop/mobile.
Had genuinely blocked it out, my memory being merciful to me.
Tried it a couple of years ago, and it was terrible - bad interface and heated up the phone like it was an FPS. Deleted and got Bernardo Zamora's Solitaire, which is much nicer.
The one great game I found labeled MS Studios was Shuffle Party, a very nice shuffleboard/bowling simulator that runs 3D animations without heating up the phone and draining the battery.
(Also signed 'Babaroga', probably some competent Russians saving the day ;-)
Windows Phone is a burning platform at this point, Microsoft canned most of the people working on it and left a few dozen interns working on it, hence why the Windows 10 images for the Lumia as of late have been very unstable.
I mean, if I could just get a nice Maemo Phone I'd be happy, like throw that on a Lumia 920 and I'd be content. There is definitely room for innovation in the mobile space, and both MS and Nokia have the hardware side of it down, they just need to choose a platform that people can get behind and make it easy to move to it (eg. have a preinstalled app compatibility layer).
It is. Commenter doesn't understand that Microsoft is just trying to regain lost ground & mindshare at this point, hence why you can get Office on your Android device for free, and it works better than it does on Windows.
I was going with the irony of commenter asserting that building the game is an inefficient allocation of MS resources when in fact productive time lost due to the ubiquity of these games has probably been one of the single most contributors to inefficient use of time in the last century (you know, due to people playing the games).
The original one was built by one intern[1], so it's quite possible so was this one. Not a huge resource suck when you are delegating one person to the job who just wants to learn.
Solitaire for Windows 8 (which forms the base for Solitaire for Windows 10 and iOS) was contracted out to Arkadium Games and then Smoking Gun Interactive. The team that built it was rather large, far more than a single person who just wants to learn.
This shouldn't be that surprising though, as Solitaire is in many ways a "flagship" app, which means it has to work on every single device that supports Windows 10 including tablets and phones and 35+ languages including right-to-left languages.
I'm on mobile and can't find the link at the moment, but somebody at Microsoft (Raymond Chen maybe?) did a blog post about Pinball and why it's not in Windows anymore and not likely to make a comeback. IIRC it was written by an outside company, and the code is extremely hairy and was deemed too much effort to port to 64-bit for the return they'd get.
The last line is: " Hey everybody asking that the source code be released: The source code was licensed from another company. If you want the source code, you have to go ask them."
Which seems like a cop out. Microsoft you've got clout, make the deal.
Microsoft's mission statement: We strive to balance all hardware performance increases with bad software, such that the overall performance continuously decreases!
> such that the overall performance continuously decreases
While I agree that 166 MB seems like a bit much for a solitaire game, how does application size have anything to do with performance? Overwatch takes up 30+ GB on my PC, doesn't mean it has poor performance...
with App thining it usually would be half, because it just downloads the thin binary of the executable and frameworks and also the assets for the screen size ..., but in this case it is almost equal, crazy
universal : 157.91 MB,
iPhone4,1 : 136.13 MB,
iPad2,5 : 136.11 MB,
iPhone8,4 : 137.30 MB
Suffice to say, if they couldn't figure out how to make it work in 64-bit, they're not going to be putting any effort into making it work in UWP and on ARM!
It will run on 64-bit OSes as-is, because they support 32-bit programs. But if you check out Raymond's response to a comment, he explains that at the time, 32-bit apps weren't supported in 64-bit Windows until much later. And even once it was possible, it wasn't considered proper to ship an OS component that wasn't actually 64-bit. (Note that while everyone's still been using 32-bit Internet Explorer for the most part, 64-bit IE has always been included on 64-bit Windows OSes.)
IIRC Windows XP 64-bit was supposed to be a pure 64-bit OS - no compatibility layer for 32-bit apps. Which is most of the reason it didn't get some great adoption.
Later versions of 64-bit Windows had that compatibility layer.
64-bit XP ran 32 bit apps just fine. A little more than a decade ago I built a machine with it, and wound up giving it to my very much non techie parents who had no issues with it.
I think the only thing I had trouble with on that machine was finding drivers for a particular printer.
Windows XP 64 Bit Edition was 64-bit only and ran on Intel Itanium processors. Windows XP Professional 64 Bit Edition ran on AMD64 architecture and included 32-bit compatibility with x86 Windows, but not 16-bit compatibility with DOS. It provided a preview of the broken drivers that were part of the Vista rollout.
No worries, Macs will soon switch to "OS - a spiritual descendant of iOS and macOS, that we call just 'OS'. It's revolutionary."
It's really iOS without the i, and it's a worse combination of touch UI and mouse/keyboard UI than Windows 8, but it's made by Apple, so the tech press will praise it, and people who should know better will buy devices running it by the millions.
I am really confused as to why they think anyone would pay $2/month for solitaire... what happens if you don't pay, is it ad supported or just stops working?
Ad-supported plus some other limited features such as daily challenges. It is the same on Windows 10 with the built in Solitaire app although I think it is $2.49 there(!)
I searched "Solitaire" and "Microsoft Solitaire" and it didn't come up. I had to type "Microsoft Solitaire Collection" before I could find it in the App Store. Not to mention it's not even featured under Categories>Games>Cards..
They're talking about the App Store most likely. Just give it time and it'll rise to the top. Not enough searches -> downloads to sway the servers yet.
It's actually a lot better than normal Solitaire. You can stack cards by rank (lower on top) in alternating color. The goal is to get the cards in stacks of their own suit in the reverse order in the upper right. The upper left are the free cells, that can store a single card each. The cool thing is that using the free cells and other empty spots, you can move larger stacks of alternating colors.
In college I tried to see how many games of Freecell I could win without marking a loss. I got up to 1100 before I played a game that someone sent me (seed) that was unbeatable.
100 comments
[ 500 ms ] story [ 4105 ms ] thread48 MB of code and frameworks (including 10 MB for Swift).
http://imgur.com/a/MezGl
(crickets)
(Dammit, even the 'MS Studios' games get pointless ads. Class act there.)
Runs very well on my Lumia 950 XL
Tried it a couple of years ago, and it was terrible - bad interface and heated up the phone like it was an FPS. Deleted and got Bernardo Zamora's Solitaire, which is much nicer.
The one great game I found labeled MS Studios was Shuffle Party, a very nice shuffleboard/bowling simulator that runs 3D animations without heating up the phone and draining the battery.
(Also signed 'Babaroga', probably some competent Russians saving the day ;-)
Sadly, its time to migrate off Windows Phone.
I have trouble believing that a 90%-10% duopoly in mobile platforms is an healthy steady state for this market.
Probably something else - not as good - will come in and occupy the vacuum.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zfadv/til_t...
This shouldn't be that surprising though, as Solitaire is in many ways a "flagship" app, which means it has to work on every single device that supports Windows 10 including tablets and phones and 35+ languages including right-to-left languages.
Just hurry up and release minesweeper already, and stop teasing us!
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=...
I even installed it on my Linux machine once, under WINE: if you miss it too, I reccomend you do the same: works like a charm.
The last line is: " Hey everybody asking that the source code be released: The source code was licensed from another company. If you want the source code, you have to go ask them."
Which seems like a cop out. Microsoft you've got clout, make the deal.
Or "Microsoft, you've got the developers, code a remastered version."
For a while this was the only multiplayer game on Windows Phone.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wordament/id580935508
Microsoft's mission statement: We strive to balance all hardware performance increases with bad software, such that the overall performance continuously decreases!
While I agree that 166 MB seems like a bit much for a solitaire game, how does application size have anything to do with performance? Overwatch takes up 30+ GB on my PC, doesn't mean it has poor performance...
https://www.reddit.com/user/julingks/
Thanks!
Suffice to say, if they couldn't figure out how to make it work in 64-bit, they're not going to be putting any effort into making it work in UWP and on ARM!
Later versions of 64-bit Windows had that compatibility layer.
I think the only thing I had trouble with on that machine was finding drivers for a particular printer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions#64-bit_edi...
[1] http://portingkit.com/game/268
EDIT: I guess this is for iOS, so the joke is ruined.
It's really iOS without the i, and it's a worse combination of touch UI and mouse/keyboard UI than Windows 8, but it's made by Apple, so the tech press will praise it, and people who should know better will buy devices running it by the millions.
https://appsto.re/us/UIpgJ.i
Also old people
I was just trying to help? If you put that search into Google you will get better results than the app store itself.
https://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/store/product/atari-reg-fla...