Whirlwind WordSearch
macOS / Education
Whirlwind WordSearch is a word search (aka Word Find) puzzle maker that creates and prints uniquely engaging word search puzzles from your own lists of words. It is not just a pretty puzzle-maker though, underneath is a powerful puzzle-generating engine. It offers many different shapes, sizes, fonts, languages, and difficulty levels. It quietly removes any randomly created "naughty words". It lets you easily save royalty-free puzzles for publishing in your books, blogs or newsletters. All of this for one price... no monthly fees, no sudden updating costs. Ever.
Here's a list of features that make Whirlwind WordSearch an outstanding puzzle-generator.
* Easily customize your puzzles, choosing different colors, fonts, and sizes for the puzzle letters and titles.
* Choose from many built-in puzzle shapes: Square, Circle, Bow-tie, Rectangle Tall/Wide, Heart, Diamond, Pinwheel, X, UL-Wedge, LL-Wedge, UR-Wedge, LR-Wedge, Square-hole, Donut, Checkers, Crescent, Plus-sign, Right-Arrow, Left-Arrow, Up-Arrow, Down-Arrow, Up-Triangle, Down-Triangle, Cross, Onion Dome, 4-Clover, Square-Peg, Round-Hole, Mushroom, Oval-Easy, Oval-Up, Trapezoid, Pentagon, Hexagon, Octagon, 4-star, 5-star, 6-star, Chevron-Up, Chevron-Down, Chevron-Left, Chevron-Right, Rainbow-up, Rainbow-down, Infinity.
* Create puzzles ranging in size from 4x4 up to 50x50 letters. The Pro upgrade increases that up to 80x80.
* Create word puzzles with words in English, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese-Hiragana, Japanese-Katakana, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit-Latin, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Welsh.
* Create number puzzles too, using Arabic numbers or Chinese/Japanese numbers.
* All created puzzles are yours! Publish and make money with them… there are no copyright restrictions or restrictive “commercial use” clauses!
* Your work is safely yours. Your puzzles stay on your computer and you never need to create an account or store any of your information in the cloud.
* Bulk-Export up to 100 different puzzles at a time, using the Bulk-Builder in the Pro version.
* "Basic Difficulty Mode" lets you simply move a slider from "very easy" puzzles to "very hard" puzzles, without worrying about all the details of how it works. For more control, "Advanced Difficulty Mode" lets you control each of the fine-grained parameters yourself.
* Export high-quality puzzles and answer keys to a number of different file formats, ready for web, newsletters, worksheets, books, or other publications: PDF, PNG, JPEG, SVG, Text, IPUZ.
* Save a "snapshot" your custom layout settings so you can instantly build other puzzles with the same "look".
* Show "word clue" phrases instead of the words themselves, to make puzzles even more challenging.
* Add a "secret message" into your puzzle, which will be inserted between your words as a secondary puzzle to solve.
* Add "hidden words" into your puzzle that are not shown in the word list or answer key (for adding copyrights or extra credit words.)
* Use compound-words with spaces, dashes or apostrophes (O'Hara), or use entire phrases (May The Force Be With You).
* Extend the built-in naughty word list with your own extra words, which will be removed from any puzzles if found in the random letters.
* Add your own "permanently added hidden words", which will always be added to any word search puzzles you make.
* Any randomly-generated "naughty" words are automatically found and removed, in any chosen language.
* Supports Dark Mode and Full-Screen mode.
* Save your puzzle files, and open them again later to instantly create whole new puzzles, or share them with other Whirlwind WordSearch users.
* Comprehensive built-in User Guide contains 90+ pages of tutorials and tips and describes every option, getting you up-to-speed right away. Advanced features are explained, helping you create high-quality and uniquely personalized puzzles.
Quoi de neuf dans la dernière version ?
* Added the ability to show a word in the word list but NOT put in the puzzle, for a "Find the Missing Word" style game (IanM)
* Completely re-designed the "Tip of the Day" window to be much prettier, and with helpful graphics! Take a look by pressing (command)(option)-T..
* User Tips window now has a checkbox at the bottom to let you directly turn ON or OFF the auto-show-tips (which you can also do in the Application Settings window, but that is harder for people to find. (Thanks JamesR.)
* Added a slider (Under Printing:Answer tabs) to fine-adjust the width of the answer oval (thanks IanM and JenO)
* Renamed the Application Settings:Extras feature to Puzzle Aspect Ratio.
* Added more clarification in the Intro Screen window top text to describe where to find the user guide. (Thanks JamesR)
* Relative Font size for letters can now grow to 2x (instead of 1.5x), allowing smaller fonts to take up a larger area. (Thanks IanM)
* BugFix: When re-opening your saved documents, the colors you chose now are remembered exactly and don't "slowly drift" toward other colors. This change unfortunately will RESET your prior saved document colors to defaults this one upgrade-time, and you will need to re-choose any custom colors and save the updated document. After that it will forever remember the proper color. (Thanks IanM)
* BugFix: Building a puzzle with shorter words would sometimes create a random duplicate of that word that it would not find and eliminate (Thanks DeanF)
* BugFix: Made the preview window more squishable, so that the Full-screen view mode works properly and does not hide the bottom buttons off the screen.
* BugFix: Fixed the top-bottom-avoidance-detection logic so small puzzles (less than 8 high) don't avoid top/bottom
* BugFix: After export# is set to some # and saved as default, future launches of Whirlwind will correctly pre-set the export counter to that number.
