Whirlwind WordSearch
macOS / Education
Whirlwind WordSearch is a word search (aka Word Find) puzzle maker that lets you create and publish 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" in any language you choose. It lets you easily export royalty-free puzzles for publishing in your books, blogs or newsletters. All of this with no monthly fees, no internet accounts, no sudden updating costs. Ever.
Whirlwind WordSearch solves your puzzle-making needs with many impressive features:
* 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, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese-Hiragana, Japanese-Katakana, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit-Latin, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Welsh.
* Create number puzzles, using Arabic numbers or Chinese/Japanese numbers.
* All puzzles are yours! Publish and make money with them… there are no copyright restrictions, royalties or "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.
* Just slide the "Difficulty Mode" from "easy" puzzles to "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 later to instantly create whole new puzzles, or share them with other Whirlwind WordSearch users.
* Comprehensive built-in User Guide contains 100+ 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 ?
What's New in 5.3.1:
Fixed typos in AppStore description, and minor bug fixed.
What's New in 5.3.0:
* Added new language support... Icelandic! Halló Björk!
* Added the Secret Message prompts to the bottom of the exported files, if you choose to display them.
* Pro: You can now export to a new "ESP File" (JSON) that captures all the puzzle/answer information in a computer-readable way. You can use this to create book-publishing workflows, or to pour puzzles into your own interactive web or native computer games. You can find it when exporting your files as the "and ESP File" checkbox. There is an "ESP File Guide" document found in the HELP menu.
* Added the author/copyright text field info into your exported SVG files... they will be stamped into the header comment of your files.
* Renamed the IPUZ-specific Application-Settings tab "IPUZ EXPORT" to a more all-encompassing "AUTHOR INFO", because the author/copyright fields you enter here are now being used in multiple export file formats (IPUZ, ESP, SVG, text).
* You can now turn off/on tooltips on the main window and menu bar, with a new button under the App Settings window's "Appearance" tab.
* Added command-keys to cover all the Edit:Copy-As commands, for better disabilities-support.
* Added the option to add little indicator arrows with each word in your printed word list as an extra hint of where to look, see the Layout:Word List:What to Display... area. (Thanks Thomas!)
* Added a way to copy an image of the word-directions used as a graphic arrow-image for pasting into your word processor. Also see the explanation in the user guide on page 95, "Word Direction Arrows as Image" (Thanks Thomas!)
* Finished rolling the optional woodgrain background into the export and bulk-builder windows.
* Big User Guide clarification/updates to the Bulk Builder section 4.30, and to the Title section 5.3, to better explain how to add an automatic puzzle counter to the title of the exported or bulk-built puzzles (Thanks JamesR!)
* BugFix: The broken SEARCH capability in the User Guide and Bulk Builder Guide windows (under the Help menu) is now fixed!
