Giving friends custom text buzzes based on morse code

I ran out of time to write a good blog post for September, so I wrote a quick blog post for September. Oops!

I sometimes have my phone in my pocket with notifications on. When that happens, I can feel every time my phone buzzes. I know when someone has texted me because I have a custom vibration pattern for text messages that is distinct from other notifications. However, I have historically had few distinctions between different people, so I don't know who has texted me.

I find this annoying. Of all the notifications on my phone, texts have the highest signal-to-noise ratio. Most texts I receive are individual messages from friends or colleagues. However, at any given time, there's maybe only a 40% chance that a text is actually relevant to what I'm currently doing.

So either I bring my phone out of my pocket, or I get curious wondering who has texted me. (I particularly enjoy getting texts out of the blue, so it's a distracting thought.)

While I generally keep my notifications off to avoid this problem, there are times when I am expecting a text response from someone that I need to respond to quickly.¹ In such cases, I'd like a way to know when the text is actually relevant.

With an iPhone, it's possible to give custom text buzzes to different people. In the past, I've done this for my family members. But I've wanted a way to distinguish more people in my life.

Recently, I got fed up and made custom text tones for about 25 people I know. Because I wanted to be systematic, I gave each person text tones based on the Morse Code of their initials.

How I did it

I wish I could have done this in an automated manner, but I ended up having to make each text tone by hand. The whole process took about 45 minutes.

I figured out which friends I wanted to start with and recorded the buzz pattern for each individually. I did all the recording from the centralized place in Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Text Tone > Haptics > Create New Vibration. (It's possible to record a new vibration directly from a contact, but that's more annoying because you can't switch apps midway through). I then named the text tone the initials of the person in question.

Then, to update a individual contact, I opened each contact, clicked Edit > Text Tone > Haptics, and then clicked the already-made vibration pattern.

One thing made recording the vibrations a lot easier. I had Claude make me an artifact where I could press on someone's initials and the Morse Code pattern would play as a series of beats. Here's what it looked like.²

Each text tone took somewhere between one to five attempts, but overall, the process wasn't too bad.

Notes