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Morse Code Tools 4.3:
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The News and Keyer applications have built-in help (Help me! links). Go there for usage and background info. This is a major upgrade, so please look at the Release Notes below or in the help files.
CHANGES AND ADDITIONS:
Version 4.3 (Minor update to Morse News only)
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- Address Twitter's new requirement for TLS 1.2 encryption as of September 1, 2019. Requires Windows Update KB3154518 on Windows 7.
- Fix "currently authenticated" unnamed Twitter feeds so they don't repeatedly ask for permission with the PIN. SHIFT key still forces re-authentication.
Version 4.2 (major upgrade to Morse News)
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- Feeds already in the dropdown list may now be viewed and/or edited. Both the feed name and the URL may be changed.
- The flow of Twitter oAuth authentication has been greatly improved, and made more bulletproof. This involved considerable refactoring of the code. Most importantly, the Twitter logins are preserved across fetches of tweets and messages. Also logins for specific Twitter users are double checked to make sure a browser already logged into the wrong account wasn't used for oAuth exchange, resulting in the messages coming from the wrong timeline.
- Twitter's API rate limits are now respected in a more intelligent fashion. This often results in no delay between batches of stories when it is busy, and minimal delays between checks when it is quiet. The Twitter API library has been ennhanced to provide access to current rate limit status.
- Retweets are now processed so as to preserve the "extended" text (greater than 140 characters) on retweets as well as normal tweets.
- The twitter:///xxx "current user" login has been made much more robust.
- Multiple twitter logins (from Morse News feed list files) are supported. It is possible to combine multiple Twitter feeds from different Twitter users along with other RSS and Atom feeds into a single Morse code news feed.
- A new option Retweets=no is now supported for Twitter:// URLs. It will omit retweets from /timeline, /user, and /mentions timelines.
- A new option Replies=yes is now supported for Twitter:// URLs. It will include retweets from /timeline, /user, and /mentions timelines.
- Twitter Direct Messages are always sent out before other Twitter news sources, regardless of their time stamps.
- The Sound Configuration form now reflects the currently selected sound device when it is opened, instead of Primary Sound Device.
- The Sound Configuration form has been widened to show the longer sound device names.
- Fix crash when switching between multiple ASIO devices.
- Unicode left- and right-doublequotes are now converted to Morse double-quote
- The "old story" duplicate detection for Twitter messages has been improved. No longer uses the Twitter message ID as in 4.1.1). Instead it uses the first 30 characters of the lessage, like the other feed sources. Twitter was duplicating stories with different message IDs.
- The Help document has been expanded and updated, mostly for Twitter features.
- More improvement in DebugView tracing output
Version 4.1.2 (changes to Morse News only)
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- The direct message feature has been upgraded to use the now-required "new" Twitter Direct Message API. The previous API was shut down on September 17, 2018.
Version 4.1.1 (changes to Morse News Only)
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- "Seen article" caching has been fixed for Twitter. It now uses the unique Twitter message ID as the key.
- Message formatting has been improved
- The default RSS feed list has been updated to remove discontinued AP feeds, add Reuters feeds
Version 4.1 (changes to Morse News only):
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- Add support for Twitter direct messages
- User's replies are excluded now
- Correct two subtle bugs in the Twitter API library
- Update the Twitter access tokens to add direct message permissions
- SHIFT key when clicking Start now forces Twitter re-authentication to get the latest tokens and direct message permissions
- Correct the Help Me link to have current documentation
Version 4.0 (changes to Morse News only):
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- All new feed selection logic showing the name of the feed and using a new form to enter and check feed connectivity and content.
- Added support for tweets longer than 140 characters.
- Morse News now supports ASIO audio for cleaner QRQ receiving
- Many accented characters have been added to the International Morse code tables, per modern specs.
- Stories are now read oldest to newest.
- When a new version is available, a clickable link appears on the ,main window.
- Fixed support for file:/// URI so that files ending with .xml would be read as input as already documented. This feature was broken when Twitter feeds and authenticated URIs were supported. Added .rss and .atom to the recognized file types for this.
- Updated default feed list. Yahoo! RSS feeds were taken off the air, so the initial/default feed list has been updated. An Associated Press "Top Headlines" Atom feed is now the default.
- The Help document has been expanded with more info, and outdated links replaced with current ones.
- The volume slider is now remembered between program launches
- The programs have been tested on Windows 10 (1709).
Version 3.2:
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- Twitter communication overhauled to be compatible with Twitter's newer service. This was a major change and probably has bugs.
Version 3.1:
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- Closing News or Keyer will no longer result in it being "stuck" minimized.
- The volume control now works correctly in News when fading is in effect.
- Fading has been made less severe. The volume was too low before.
Version 3.0:
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This is a fairly major update and includes new features in both programs, plus numerous tweaks and fixes in Morse News for Facebook and Twitter, and revised documentation. A Yahoo! group has been opened for use as a discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MorseTools/
- More realistic noise, static crashes, and ionospheric fading to Morse News CW tone and spark-gap sound.
- Removes ellipses (...) from news stories, and removes parens from (REUTERS) as it did before for (AP).
- NOTE: TWITTER URI'S HAVE CHANGED! THEY NOW HAVE THE USERNAME OR "" IN THE FIRST PART. See the help!
- The above is a consequence of new support for specifying the Twitter user/screen name for the feeds to be retrieved. This allows switching Morse News between Twitter feeds. You cannot mix Twitter feeds freom multiple accounts in a feed list though. Maybe some day, ha ha.
- RSS requests now include a real HTTP User-Agent: header (mimics Google Chrome). At some point in the past, this became required to successfully retrieve the Facebook notifications RSS feed.
- A great deal of additional debug tracing has been added to Morse News, revealing a number of bugs including time-stamping of articles. If you're curious about the internals of Morse News, read about how to read this info in the Help me! doc.
- The Morse News documentation has been expanded in some areas that were a bit thin.
- Support for Twitter "direct messages" has been removed. As of last year, Twitter's permissions model prohibits Twitter apps from accessing direct messages unless they also have write permission. I did not want to give Morse News permission to write to peoples' Twitter timelines.
Version 2.5:
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This update brings low-latency ASIO audio to the keyer, some command line options to the news reader, and a couple of bug fixes. See the docs for details.
Version 2.4
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This update brings Atom feed capability to Morse News, allowing you to take feeds from the Associated Press and other sources that were previously unavailable since they were not RSS.
- Both RSS and Atom feeds are now supported. This makes it possible to use feeds from the Associated Press and other Atom-only sources.
- Both Morse News and Keyer allow selecting the sound output device ("sound card") to use, if desired.
- The keyer now has control of the tone envelope rise/fall times.
- The shapes of the tone envelope leading and trailing edges are now raised-cosine instead of straight ramp. This provides a more spectrally pure (free of harmonics) tone output.
- The keyer's hand-key (manual) sending now has a shaped envelope for key-up.
- Morse News now requires DirectX for sound. The old legacy support has been removed.
Version 2.3
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This is a quick update after 2.2. The shapes of the tone envelope leading and trailing edges are now raised-cosine instead of straight ramp.
Version 2.2
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This update brings you the following bug fixes and improvements to Morse News and Morse Keyer:
- Both Morse News and Keyer allow selecting the sound output device ("sound card") to use, if desired.
- Morse News now requires DirectX for sound. The old legacy support has been removed.
- The keyer's hand-key (manual) sending now has a shaped envelope for key-up.
_ The keyer now has control of the tone envelope rise/fall times.
