Version 8.6 released

A new version with the following improvements has been released:

• Hungarian version of Morse code has been added. This version includes additional codes for character in the Hungarian alphabet such as “é”, or “ö” and also mnemonic words for easier remembering of the codes. You can switch between International Morse code and Hungarian Morse code on the Settings page. Please be also aware that in Hungarian Morse code the letters Ö and Ő share the same Morse code. The holds also for the pair of letters Ü and Ű. As a result, when you translate a message from Morse code to the plain text, the app cannot know which of these two letters should be used in the particular situation and a manual correction might be necessary.
• A small improvement UI in the dialog for encrypting or decrypting using Vigenère cipher - a popup dialog is displayed instead.
• A small improvement of the new level dialog in the learning - the dialog can also be closed by pressing Enter.
• Fixed usage of the Arabic Hamza letter in the learning based on the user feedback.
• Libraries has been updated and other necessary maintenance has been performed.

Version 8.5 released

This version includes several UI and performance improvements:

• A new setting to swap the dot and dash buttons on the Morse code keyboard. By default, the dot is displayed first (on the left) and the dash follows after it (on the right). However, if you prefer the reverse order, you can now customize it in the Settings page.
• Larger, more usable button on the manual sending page. The original small circular button has been replaced by a larger button that extends to both edges of the screen, making it easier to press with your thumbs even in landscape mode.
• Improved the dialog on the learning page for moving to a new level.
• The buttons on the learning page have been adjusted and slightly enlarged.
• The rules for when to show the larger Morse code keyboard and when to show the smaller one on the translator page have been adjusted. They should better handle the case when the application is running in the split-screen mode.
• Improved performance when sound is generated on the learning page.
• Slightly reduced audio latency on the manual sending page.

Version 8.4 released

This version focuses mainly on improvements in learning:

• There is a new way of entering an answer in Morse. You can enter it using a single button (a short tap adds a dot; a long tap adds a dash). You can practice sending during the learning. There is no sound when the button is pressed yet but I will add it soon in the following versions.
• Buttons in the learning were adjusted so that they would better use the available space on the screen.
• Arabic translation of the app has been added. Many thanks to Kyriakos Asaid for his help with the translation.

Version 8.3 released

• Improved learning: some characters look very similar (such as letter “O” and number “0”) and could be confused. To help you distinguish these characters more easily, a group name is now displayed under the question (letters / numbers / other characters / Morse codes). Moreover a frame has been added to help distinguishing characters that are similar but differs mainly by their vertical position on the line (for example coma and apostrophe).
• Saving the message in Morse code as an audio in M4A format was modified so that it would work also on older versions of Android. Previously, it was supported only for Android 8 and newer.
• A few characters were corrected in the Russian version of Morse code based on the user feedback.
• Internal changes were made to diagnose sound problems more easily.

Version 8.2 released

• It is possible to configure the behavior of the translator when the translation in Morse code is copied to the clipboard or sent to another app by the Share function. By default Unicode dots and dashes are used (for example “•−”). However, not all applications can handle these characters correctly. If you copy the translation to an app that might have problems with them, you can enable a new checkbox on the Settings page, which will cause that the copied or shared translation will contain simple dots and dashes instead of the unicode ones (".-" instead of “•−”). They don’t look great but you can be sure that all apps support them.
• Saving a message as an audio file in the compressed M4A format uses functions that require Android 8 or newer. On the older version of Android, the process failed and an error message was displayed. In this version, the selection of the M4A format on Android 7.1 and older is therefore temporarily disabled. You can still save the message as an audio file in the WAV format even on the older Android version. I am going to rewrite this feature in the future so that M4A could be used even phones with older Android versions.
• A crash was fixed - learning history pages could crash the app if the loading of the history from the database failed.

One million downloads on Google Play

Google Play reports that over one million people have already downloaded the Morse Code app 🎉✨🎉. That’s great news. Thank you all for your support and I hope that the app will serve you well also in the future.

Version 8.1 released

• The feature for saving Morse code as an audio file has been improved. Now you can select the audio file format. The previous version could create only uncompressed WAV files. This version adds the support also for the compressed MP4 Audio files (with .m4a extension). They are almost ten times smaller which makes much more suitable for longer messages.
• The translation from Morse code is now more versatile. When a slash “/” is used as the Morse codes separator, spaces can be added before or after them. So the new version is able to translate not only “.-/-…/-.-.” as in the previous version, but also for example “.- / -… / -.-.”.
• Fixed handling of the new lines when translating messages from Morse code.
• Improved performance of the pages with the learning history.

Version 8.0 released

The biggest improvement in this version is that you can save a message in the Morse code as an audio file. You can find this feature in the translator when you tap on the three dots icon in the upper right-hand corner. Currently, only uncompressed WAV format is supported. This makes this feature suitable mostly for reasonably short messages no more than a few minutes long. Each minute means about 5 MB of the used space. If you want to generate an audio file for a longer message and share it with your friends, you save it as a WAV file in the app and then you can convert it into MP3 or other more efficient format using an audio converting app of your choice. Later, I would like to the support for other more sophisticated audio formats directly into the Morse code app.

Besides this new feature, this update contains also smaller improvements:

• Setting of the custom speed has been improved in several ways. First, the app checks if the lengths of dots and dash are consistent. If you enter values that would make a dot to sound longer than a dash (which would not make sense), the app shows a warning. The consistency is checked also for the gaps between dots and dashes, and the individual letters and words in a similar way. Another improvement is the ability to confirm or cancel the new setting. In the previous version, the lengths were saved immediately as you have entered them. Another improvement to make setting the custom speed less error-prone is that the behavior has been changed when you enter an invalid value (for example a number out of the valid range). The previous version replaced the invalid value with the nearest valid value, which turned out to be very confusing and it could result that very unnatural values were set. The new version does not allow confirming the setting if there are invalid values.
• When you restore the default settings using the Reset button on the Settings page, more values are cleared. The previous version restored only the settings and restarted the app. The new version also clears the weight of characters in the learning and deletes any temporary files in the cache. This should restore the app to the state after the clean installation while preserving your learning history.
• When you are translating a message that seems to be using different separators than the ones set in the app has been improved.
• There have been a small improvement in the learning - when you should type the answer in the Morse code and evaluation of the answer as you type is enabled in the settings, the button for deleting the character is not shown. Because your answer is evaluated immediately as you type, it make no sense to delete characters in this circumstances.

As usual, the new version fixes a few bugs. A lots of them focuses on the sound problems in the specific conditions:

• More space has been added at the beginning and ending of the sounds. This could reduce the chance that the sound will be played incompletely on some Android devices.
• Fixed releasing of the resources when a file should be saved on Android and the user cancels the saving.
• Fixed rare crash on Android when a sound should be played and the Android returns an invalid value of the minimal buffer size.
• Fixed possible rare crash in the learning when a key on a hardware keyboard is pressed.
• Fixed releasing deleting of the temporary cached files when the sound playing is cancelled and an unexpected error occurs during this cancelation.
• Fixed performance of the sound playing on Android in the learning, in the Morse codes list, and in the Q-codes list. The new version uses a much more efficient method for preparing the sound data. The performance problem has been unintentionally introduced in the version 7.9 in April 2024.
• Fixed a few typos in the texts.

Version 7.10 released

This version adds following improvements:

• The learning history can be exported to a file and imported from a file. This feature has been already in the previous version but for Windows only. This version adds its implementation also for Android. This can be very handy for making backups or for moving your data to another device.
• The app has been translated to Slovak by Kocúr. It is therefore available in 17 languages. Many thanks to all translators who volunteered to translated it.
• Small performance improvements for the page with the learning history and for sharing a text for translation from another app.

There are a few useful notes for the history import/export on Android:

• These features can be accessed on the page with the learning history when you tap on the three dots icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. This will open a menu with the new items for the history import and export.
• The opening or saving data into a file is solved using Storage Access Framework. This works as follows: The Morse Code app just asks Andorid to display the standard dialog for choosing files. You can select a file in this dialog. The Android will then make just this selected file accessible for the Morse Code app. The big advantage is that this solution is privacy-friendly. The app does not require any special permissions and does not have access to your files (just to the selected one). A small drawback is that the dialog for selecting is not customizable and its look and features depend on the Android version and can also differ for various phones manufacturers.
• You can usually find a button with three horizontal lines in the upper left-hand part of the dialog for selecting files. Tapping on this button usually displays various locations such as downloads, your phone or SD card folders, or cloud storages such as Google Drive. The list of available storage can differ on different phones depending on your Android version and phone manufacturer.
• The standard Android dialog behaves in a bit unusual way when you are exporting the history and when you select a file that already exists. In the most cases, Android will not overwrite the file but it will instead create a new file with a number appended to it (for example, if you exports your history to a file called “history.json” and the file already exists, android will save it as a new file “history (1).json”). This is somehow similar as when you are downloading files in your browser. But you should not depend on this behavior. I have seen cases when Android allowed rewriting the file. I recommend selecting a unique file name for the export instead of overwriting an older already existing file.
• If you encounter a problem that you will not be able to select some file for import or export, please let me know (my e-mail is pavel.holecek.4@gmail.com).

Version 7.9 released

This version contains the following new features and improvements:

• In the Windows version, you can export your learning history to a file, or imported it from a file. This can be very useful if you want to backup your data or transfer them to a new phone/computer. Currently, this feature is available for Windows only. I would like to make it available also for Android in the next version. It is almost ready but I have found out that it does not work well for some devices with an older Android version. Once I fix this problem, I will add these features into the Android version, too.
• The app has been translated to Italian thanks to Preziuso Vito.
• The app has been translated to Croatian thanks to Silver_Vatu.
• There has been a minor improvement in the learning in case that you use Morse Code versions that contains mnemonics (such as Spanish version of Morse code). After an incorrect answer, the mnemonic for the incorrectly translated letter is also displayed.
• Transition between the tabs with the Morse Codes list and Q-Codes list by swiping has been fixed (in Android version).
• Two bugs that can cause app to crash have been fixed on the page with the learning history.
• There have been small performance improvements in the learning history.

I have also changed one setting on the Google Play. I have selected the minimum age category for the target audience 9-12 years. A bit younger age category used to be selected as the minimum before. However, I have updated this setting based on the feedback from applying to the Teacher Approved program. I hope that it will not cause any trouble. In case that the app is not available for someone after this change, please contact me on my email.

SPOILER: A little spoiler for the following versions. I am working on adding support for the learning history import/export also for the Android. This should be included in the next version. The next big feature I am working on is generating audio files from Morse code. I have a working concept. There is still a lot to be done but I hope that this feature will be ready soon.