HotPaw Guitar Tuner - Now available for the Mac

The HotPaw iChromatic Strobe Tuner has been a popular app in the Music section of the Mac App store.  Now available is a lower priced HotPaw Strobe Guitar Tuner, with the same accuracy and ease of use, but designed specifically for tuning 6 string guitars.

Wikipedia calls strobe tuners "the most accurate type of tuner", and our tuners for the iPhone, iPad and now the Mac will show you why.

New app: Morse Code Ringtone Maker

HotPaw Productions newest app is Morse Code Ringtone Maker , now available in the iOS App Store.

Create ringtones with your own customized Morse Code messages.  Don't bore people with yet another pop tune blaring from your phone.  Be different... retro-tech.  Communicate.  Or just hide really funny messages in your ringtones for "special" people (be they your best friends or your worse enemies).  Only other radio geeks will understand.

With Morse Code Ringtone Maker, you can customize the text and the Morse Code/CW speed (combined up to 30 seconds in length), as well as the the tone frequency.  The Words-Per-Minute (WPM) speed is variable from 5 to 40 WPM.  The tone frequency is customizable from 300 to 1200 Hz.  On the customization page, you can also configure Farnsworth timing where the dots and dashes for each letter come even faster than the WPM of the letters.

Morse Code Ringtone Maker requires that you can Sync your iPhone using iTunes on your Mac or PC, and have done so previously.   You can either email your newest ringtone file directly from the app, or use iTunes File Sharing to get your ringtone files from this app into iTunes on your Mac or PC, where they can then be Sync'd to your iPhone.

To get your ringtones from Morse Code Ringtone Maker into iTunes, connect your iPhone to iTunes running on your Mac or PC.  Start iTunes on your Mac or PC.  Connect your iPhone.  Select your iPhone under Device on the left side of iTunes.  Select Apps on the top of iTunes.  Scroll down to File Sharing.  Select Morse Ring from the list of Apps.  Select your chosen ringtone from the list of documents, and save it to your disk.  Then drag the .m4r ringtone file icon back from your disk onto iTunes.  To install the ringtone onto your iPhone, select Tones on the top of iTunes.  Select Sync Tones.  Then select which ringtones your want to Sync, then Sync.

To customize your iPhone's ringtone for a particular contact, select a contact from the Contacts app or within the Phone app on your iPhone.  Hit Edit and you will be able to select a ringtone for that contact.  Or you can use Sounds in the Settings app to set a global default ringtone.

Enjoy.

GMail Tap and Morse2Text

Google publicized their GMail Tap app on April 1st.  It was widely reported as an April Fools day joke. The GMail Tap app that allows people to enter email using only a 2 key keyboard... which just happened to be buttons for the Morse Code dot and dash.

However the HotPaw Productions Morse2Text iPhone app has been in Apple's iOS App store for over a year.  It allows both straight keying and an Iambic keyer mode with one button for dots and one for dashes, where it then converts the Morse Code into text which can be sent directly to Mail.

And Morse2Text has actual blind customers who find it useful.  No joke at all.

Morse Decoder 1.1.0 Mac App Store update

The HotPaw Morse Code Decoder, version 1.1.0, is now available from the Mac App store.  It is currently still the only Morse Code or CW app available from Apple's Mac App Store.  A free update for current users should be shown automatically when running the App Store app on your Mac.

Two important new features were added to version 1.1.0.

The first new feature is an audio input selection option for users with USB or PCI audio input devices.  Some of these 3rd party USB or PCI accessories will allow line-level audio input directly from a radio receiver.  The use of an audio line-input instead of a microphone may allow for even more accurate Morse Code decoding.  The choice of audio input can now be selected within the app.

Also added is an option for manual control of the threshold level for detecting Morse Code dits and dahs above a background noise floor.  This option can be enabled by turning AGC off, which is useful when the AGC cannot adapt properly to high levels of noise or fading in the audio signal.  The feature works best in conjunction with the optional narrow band filter, which can be enabled just by clicking on the desired frequency peak shown by the built-in spectrum analyzer.

iAutoharp and HotPaw Basic for iOS updates

The iAutoharp app for iOS has been update to version 1.5.  It's a great little easy to play 36-string musical instrument, where you can strum easy-to-select chords.  This version should fix the responsive and lag issues which had been reported for previous versions.  The strings now animate when strummed using a new faster display update method that does not slow down multi-touch strumming or chord changes.

HotPaw Basic for iOS has been updated to version 1.5.6.  (It's the same as 1.5.5, plus some small bug fixes to the built-in help.)  This version adds some new user-requested functions for  getting location (GPS coordinates) and accelerometer information from the device.  A new function to sample the audio input has also been added.  Another very useful addition is a mode allowing editing program text in a small window, instead of one line-at-a-time.