About the Author

Goodsol Development Inc.

Goodsol Development Inc. is a Springfield Illinois based company that develops solitaire games for sale on the internet and does Microsoft Visual Basic custom programming and consulting.

Our flagship product is Pretty Good Solitaire, this program you are looking at right now.  It is one of the most downloaded Visual Basic programs in the world.

Since we began in 1995, our Windows 3.1 and Windows 95/98/ME/XP/Vista/7/8 and Mac OS X products have been downloaded millions of times.  This vast experience in supporting programs on so many machines gives us expert knowledge in the issues surrounding wide distribution of Visual Basic applications.  Our interest is in providing easy-to-use, well-designed programs.

Other Goodsol Development programs include Pretty Good MahJongg, Action Solitaire, Goodsol Solitaire 101, Most Popular Solitaire, and FreeCell Plus.  Goodsol Development products have been sold in both the shareware and the retail markets.

I believe that all software designers should play computer games. The users of computer games pay real money for the privilege. Most users of business productivity software are paid to use it. Imagine how the interfaces of business software would change if users paid for it they way they do for games!  - Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic.

Thomas Warfield, programmer of Pretty Good Solitaire

I began programming in 1978 on a Radio Shack TRS-80 with 4K of memory.  After attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the 1980s and emerging with a Masters in Mathematics, I taught mathematics at Illinois State University and other colleges until becoming a programmer again in the 90s.  In 1994 I began programming in Microsoft Visual Basic for a job and needed a project to learn how to program in the language.  I decided that a solitaire program sounded fun, so I wrote one.  During graduate school I had played solitaire endlessly to avoid actually studying, so I knew quite a few games.  During 1994 I wrote several solitaire games and released some of them as shareware, where they died a deserved death.  In 1995, having learned how not to do it, I wrote the first version of Pretty Good Solitaire.  It had a number of novel features for the time, such as unlimited undo and automatic game saving.  I set a goal of writing 100 solitaire games, which has now of course been long surpassed.

I live in Springfield, Illinois with my wife Anne (Diane) and our cats,  Random, Bandit, and Caramel. In my free time I surf the internet, read science fiction, play with my cats, play chess, and, of course, solitaire.