Tuning Fork

Tuning Fork — a chromatic and instrument tuner for the Mudita Kompakt. Black on white, and it stays awake while you play.

音叉 onsa

A chromatic and instrument tuner for an E Ink phone. Black on white, no colour anywhere, and the screen stays awake while you play.

Built for the Mudita Kompakt, whose 4.3" panel has sixteen greys, a slow redraw, and is read at arm's length on a music stand.

What it is Michael Moessner's Tuner, re-clothed for E Ink. It is a serious instrument: chromatic and per-instrument tuning, a pitch history plot, a cents readout, stretch tuning, and a temperament editor that goes well past equal temperament — just intonation, meantone, Werckmeister, Kirnberger, and any custom scale you care to enter.

None of that is mine. What is mine is what it looks like and how it behaves on this screen.

What changed for E Ink One appearance. Light, dark, black-night and dynamic colour are gone. The panel has one appearance — dark marks on a light ground, in daylight — and a theme setting the hardware cannot honour is a setting that lies. The Appearance row is gone from settings with it.

In tune is not green. Upstream says in-tune and out-of-tune in green and red. On sixteen greys those arrive as two near-identical mid-tones, so an app leaning on them says nothing and says it confidently. Both are black here, and the reading is carried by where the needle sits against the centre line — which is how a mechanical tuner did it before anyone had a colour display.

The screen stays on by default. Upstream makes this a setting and defaults it off; it is still a setting, and it now starts on. A tuner sits on a music stand and is glanced at between phrases, and you cannot put down a bow to wake a phone.

No icons on settings rows. On this panel a small glyph beside every row costs a column of width and renders as a smudge. The label is the thing.

MMD lists. The scrolling lists use MMD's, which step rather than glide — a fling on E Ink is a smear.

Larger plot type. Upstream's 14sp is sized for a phone in the hand. This is read from a music stand.

Names that fit. The temperament list gave every row the same circled letter and then had no width left for its title, so six rows read "Equal temperame…" and were told apart only by the line beneath. The badge column is gone there and the titles have two lines. The instrument list keeps its drawings, because a guitar and a violin are told apart by them.