The app
FLAGPARLEY
Semaphore and signal flags, learned by hand.
Before radios crackled across the water, ships and shore stations talked with flags: arms swung into shapes, coloured banners hoisted up a line. The language is still taught, still used, and genuinely good fun to learn. Flagparley puts both classic systems into one trainer — semaphore, spelled with two hand flags, and the international maritime signal alphabet, where every letter flies its own flag.
The semaphore deck
Tap a letter and the figure snaps into the correct arm pose, with tips on how to hold it.
The signal deck
Tap a flag and its pattern is drawn precisely, with its name and the meaning it carries at sea when flown alone.
Everything is drawn on the canvas — the swinging figure, the striped and quartered flags, the numeral pennants — so it stays crisp at any size and there is nothing to download.
The message player is the part that makes it click. Type anything, pick semaphore or signal flags, and watch your words go out one signal at a time, with play, pause, step and speed, and the option to save a message and replay it later.
A staged lesson path walks through the alphabet in manageable groups, and the quizzes keep you honest: name the pose, name the flag, recall what a flag means, or spell a short word, all scored so you can watch yourself improve. Switch between Bulgarian and English, set the animation speed, pick your deck's accent colours. Offline, no account, no ads.
Get Flagparley on Google PlayPackage com.hoistline.flagparley
A trainer, not a signal book. Several of these flags carry real meanings at sea, and a few of them mean an emergency. Flagparley teaches the system; it doesn't replace the official International Code of Signals, your skipper's briefing or your training. Don't fly a real signal you don't intend, and if you are in trouble on the water, use the radio: VHF channel 16, or 112 in Bulgaria and across the EU.
Working out
Why eight arm positions, and how far can a flag actually talk?
Two questions with exact answers. Semaphore puts each arm in one of a few fixed positions, equally spaced around the body. Both arms never occupy the same spot, so the number of distinguishable signals is the number of ways to pick two positions out of n.
The count
The range
What you're looking through
Eight positions give 28 signals, which is exactly what semaphore needs: 26 letters plus the numeral sign and the cancel sign, with nothing spare. Seven positions would give 21 and leave five letters homeless; nine would give 36 and waste eight, while making neighbouring poses 40° apart instead of 45° and harder to tell apart at distance. Each signal carries 4.81 bits, a little under a byte for every swing of the arms.
For the flags, eyesight loses to geometry only when you bring a telescope. Reading a 1.1 m flag means resolving details about a quarter that size; at the usual limit of one arcminute of visual acuity that's 0.95 km with bare eyes, 6.6 km through 7× binoculars and 18.9 km through a 20× scope. The horizon from a 10 m bridge to a 15 m hoist sits at 25.1 km, so it is your eyes that stop the conversation, not the curve of the planet.
What's not here: no alphabet, no poses, no flags and no message player. This page counts the system and measures its reach; it never shows you a single letter. The decks, the lessons and the quizzes are the app.
On paper
PixelThorn Interactive
Published from Pernik. We write in Bulgarian and English, and we keep the apps offline because a trainer that needs a signal is a trainer you can't take on the water.
- Company
- BUROL EOOD, trading as PixelThorn Interactive
- Manager
- Hristina Stoimenova
- Address
- Distr. Kutsiyan, Bl. 10, Apt. 6, Pernik 2300, Bulgaria
- hoist@burol.homes
Можете да ни пишете и на български.