Concept
I’ve been fascinated with Mose Code since I was a child, seeing the little cards attached to walkie-talkies, my scouting book at a Wolf Scout, Bear, and Weebalo, and seeing it as plot points in films like “Executive Decision”, “Independence Day”, or “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier”.
I messed around a few times with doing conversions in languages and systems like Hypercard or JAVA, but never thought of it as anything more than a novelty. When the App Store launched, I thought, “I should make a fun app for converting text to Morse Code”. However, I didn’t have a computer I could use to write for the App Store, and years later when I did, it had slipped me mind. During COVID the idea struck again, but none of the languages I knew, were compatible with iOS, at least not easily, so I tried to learn Swift on my own, and it was so difficult, I got frustrated, and gave up.
Last year, I had a crazy idea, what if I got some help writing a text-to-morse app, just for fun. So I spent a few months working on each routine, using resources like Stack Overflow and ChatGPT to fill in the gaps in my knowledge to not only convert my translation idea into functioning routines, but into a full on app. But not just a translation app, the basis for many more ideas I can in the near future.
What is Flash Traffic?
At present, Flash Traffic is a simple Text-to-Morse translation and production application for iOS. It takes the text you provide it, and converts it to Morse Code. Then, depending on your settings (and your devices capabilities), flashes the camera flash and/or screen, beeps the speaker, or engages the haptic engine to perform the Morse Code that it translated. It is a lot of fun just to see the app in action.
Why “Flash Traffic”?
I really struggled for a name that stood out. I canvassed friends, family, AI, and none of them had anything that really jumped out at me. Then one evening I recalled a scene from “Crimson Tide”, where they received “Flash Traffic”, and I recall hearing that term other times in films, TV shows, and even among the pilots and airmen I grew up around, and it sort of just clicked.
Ideas for the future…
This is just the first step. I need to know people like it before I move on to the next steps. My ideas include being able to export the audio translations to a .wav file to allow you to share them with others; be able to accept a .wav file or record your surroundings and translate what is heard back into text. Eventually be able to use the camera to register a flashing light and translate it as well.
Supported languages
Technically, anything that can be written using the extended latin character set should be supported. I also included letters with diacritical marks based on what information I could find published online, as well as punctuation from similar sources. It won’t be perfect, as standards for things outside of the basic latin set and typical numerals are not universally agreed upon, from what I can find.