Some of you who are interested in electronic music may know Moog analog synthesizers and guitar effects. With their big stainless steel knobs, LEDs and very elaborate technology behind them, they create enormously noisy, grungy and disturbing sounds. The company also managed to create a very polished music production app for the iPad, animoog. The UI designer of today’s pick, iToneMaker Morse Code, was definitely inspired by this company’s product design, but nevertheless the app is a very unique and lovely compiled ringtone maker for your iPhone.
As the name might already suggest, the app’s sound production is based on the morse code principle. Hence you have to type in a word or a random letter/digit combination as the basis of your new ringtone into a message panel within the main window. The slightly different sounds of the single characters are played consecutively and result in the final ringtone.
Within this main window you can also change the basic elements of your ringtone: like “normal” analog synths, iToneMaker is based on (in this case obviously digital) oscillatory sound production. You can choose between triangular, saw and square oscillators and adjust their pitch, speed and break length between the morse sounds via custom sliding controls. Just push the central play button and your ringtone is played back, over and over… it can get pretty annoying, I warrant you.
If you are not satisfied with the output of these few controls - which happened to me literally every time I tried to produce an agreeable sound - you can additionally superimpose more editing features via the option button. You’ll find reverb and low-pass filter regulators plus some different effector types and the ability to change pitch while a morse tone is played. Besides that, developers Eiji and Tom kindly created some presets to choose from so that you never have to start from scratch completely and possibly never get to a passable ringtone result.
But let’s go back to the Moog-inspired UI. The knobs marking the advanced features are designed threedimensionally with a reflecting silver tone and are definitely dominating the individual style of the app. Everything else has got a monochromic look to it and the selector buttons feature a very nice custom indicating orange LED-design when their function is active. iToneMaker is coherent in every little detail and works really smooth with iOS 5 on my 3rd generation iPod touch. Even the implementation of the address book in order to use a friend’s name as a morse code pattern and entering longer character lines works as fast as the rest does.
There is just one small problem to the UX which I consider as relatively disadvantageous: if you superimpose the options panel it overlaps the (actually pretty big) play button and you can not stop the playback from there, if your ringtone is still running. But for an app which features such a cool and elaborated interface and is still available for free, this seems like a quite acceptable problem to me.
