Morse Mania App Reviews
In a field not exactly flooded with competition, Morse Mania has amazingly lowered the bar. Interested in having a program ‘tutor’ you? Then don’t get this app. I wish I had my money back. Exasperatingly unresponsive buttons (you CAN remove them from the screen or grey them out when they’re not available, you know), absolutely NO feedback, and most importantly no education value whatsoever. It is theft that I even paid $5 for this.
I dont think this app runs well on Lion or Mountain Lion. On Lion the character speed is all wrong. 10 WPM sounds like about 18 WPM or 20 WPM. Would not recommend this app until its been verified to run OK on new OSX.
Ive always wanted to get my code speed up to a reasonable level - say 20 WPM. This app seems to meet my needs. It lacks good documentation on some specifics, but is generally easy to use. I have had (and written) programs that allow for more fine tuning of character weights and spacing, but that is really not necessary. I was initially confused by some of the settings. WPM is self explanatory, but "seconds spacing" threw me for a minute. Then I realized that the spacing refers to the button to the left. In other words, the "Learn Characters" button will space characters X seconds apart based on the setting you choose. A comment was made in another review about the sending speed being off. I tested the app with a text file that contained the word "Paris" ten times. This is the classic method for testing speed. With the program set at 10 WPM the file was sent in just a bit more than 60 seconds. Thus, the speed is very close - maybe a tiny bit slow, but not enough to matter. Im using OS X 10.7.5. Remember not to click the "Farnsworth" button if you are testing the speed. Morse is an acquired skill. Im happy to have a good learning tool available whenever I have a few minutes to practice.
I have enjoyed playing with this. I havent copied in years, so it was cool to see that I still remember it. I forgot some of the punctuation. It was a little unintuitive the way it is set up. It would be better if it let you take quizzes and then checked your results. It seems you have to pull up another word processor app to type the characters into, hide the window, then check the results yourself when it completed. Wouldnt it be fun to have a multiplayer app that allowed you to communicate with others using it, if you dont have the ham equipment that is. The speed seems okay to me, if anything it seems a little slow. I was copying at 22s no problem in a few minutes. It seems easier at higher speeds to me. :) It would also be nice if there were a "clear screen" button. Also the key interpreter doesnt seem that good, but maybe I dont have the keying down the way it likes yet.
Avoid this app. In the Farnsworth method one should be able to set the character WPM and the overall tranmsission WPM. I could find no way to do this. There is only one WPM control. Turning on Farnsworth just resulted in garbled code being sent. Farnsworth is the most important sending method when learning code or increasing speed and this app does not support it properly.