ARG Tools, the iPhone app that gives you puzzle-solving tools and reference in your pocket just got a dictionary. You may already know of ARG Tools, but in case you haven’t, it’s an iPhone app that provides a set of tools, reference material, and links for anyone who plays Alternate Reality Games, participates in transmedia storytelling, or solves puzzle trails and hunts. The tools range from decoder-ring style codebreaking to countdown timer prediction. The reference material includes word frequency, morse code, semaphore, and more.
The key feature added to 2.0 is a dictionary engine that lets you search for words through pattern matching. This is useful for crosswords and cryptograms. Need a five letter word starting with NI? Punch in “NI???
” and see results like NINJA and NINES. Version 2.0 also gives you a red/green/blue color mixer in hex and decimal, several alternate views of code sheets (Morse code as a tree, pigpen as a grid, semaphore as geometric vectors).
In addition to this, you continue to get all the existing great features:
- Encoding/Decoding:
- ROT-N (from 1 to 26, including ROT-13)
- BASE64
- Vigenere / Beaufort
- Transposition
- Substitution
- Character Encodings
- Braille
- Fingerspelling
- Letters to numbers (1..26) and ASCII
- Nautical Flags
- Moon Alphabet
- Morse code
- Myst D’ni Glyphs
- Phonetic alphabet
- Pigpen Cipher
- Roman Numerals
- Semaphore
- Tools and Reference
- A list of common English words, letters, letter pairs
- Countdown timer prediction
- Dewey Decimal System
- ISO Country Codes
- Mathematical Constants, Prime Numbers
- Music Notes and their Frequencies
- Periodic Table
- Resistor Color Codes
- Zodiac, Chinese Zodiac
- Quick access to Google, Wikipedia, Sudoku Step-Solving, Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
The design goals of this application continue to be:
- Easy to use in the field
- Downloadable over the air so you can quickly obtain it without computer access
- Free-as-in-beer!
Did I mention it’s free? Go find it on the app store!
Has there been an app for Android?
ARG Tools is long obsolete. It no longer exists. It got rewritten as https://puzzlesidekick.com several years ago. I’m not an Android person, so no there isn’t an Android version, but I’ve been told there are similar things to it in the Google Play store.