Mac OS 10.8 "Mountain Lion" Note

If your security settings prevent you from installing IPA Palette, right-click (control-click) the IPAPalette.pkg icon and choose "Open" from the contextual menu. You will then be able to install without having to temporarily lower your security settings.

Download IPA Palette 2.1.1 (432K). Finally! Some documentation.
Source code can be found on GitHub.

For Mac OS X 10.2-10.4:
Download the previous IPA Palette 2.0 (1.3M).
Download the previous IPA Palette 1.0 (616K).

Fixed or changed in 2.1.1

• Several bugs in the 'uchr' parser for keyboard layouts were fixed.
• The voiced uvular implosive (ʛ) symbol was missing in 2.1 (and maybe previous versions?), replaced by an extra bilabial click (ʘ). This has been corrected.
• Modifier keys in keyboard shortcuts are shaded a dark reddish color to make them easier (I hope) to scan.

New Features in 2.1

• Got rid of the Component Manager version; now runs only on Leopard and up.
• No longer client-server architecture so less code and faster startup.
• Can display the keyboard shortcut associated with a symbol if you use an IPA keyboard layout.
• Display precomposed velarized, palatal, and retroflex characters. (click on the disclosure triangle thingy).
• New superscript character from Unicode 6.1: U+A7F9 (superscript œ). I will add U+A7F8 (faucalized voice) to the ExtIPA chart when Doulos supports it.
• Unified font sizes across charts so they are consistent and more readable.
• Export and import custom symbols.
• No longer call undocumented NSWindow/NSApp methods; [_window resignKeyWindow] and [NSApp deactivate] together seem to do the trick.

Bugs and Potential Problems

• As just pointed out to me by a user (2012-08-29) the retroflex flap is in the wrong row. This will be fixed as soon as possible.
• The PDF icon used in Snow Leopard and Lion doesn't hilite (invert to white on black) correctly in the International menu, although it does in the Pref Pane. There's probably something wrong with the alpha channel.
• Limitations in the 'uchr' resource parser means that for some complex Unicode keyboards, like Unicode Hex Input, keyboard shortcuts for IPA symbols are not found.
• Multicharacter symbols like /ǃ¡/ from ExtIPA cannot have keyboard shortcuts displayed.
• I did all these added localizations myself, and I do not speak any of the languages. There will be errors! Please point them out. I hope some of them are funny.

Feel free to subscribe to my IPA Palette announcement list if you want to be notified about new versions.

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What Folks Are Saying

• IPA Palette does exactly what a linguist would want, exactly the way a linguist would want it. It's a beautiful piece of work.
  -- M.D.
• I have a great appreciation for the computer programmers that see a need and go all the way to meet it.
  -- A.W.
• How the heck did you finally come up with an IPA system that actually WORKS?  You're a genius! Thank you!
  -- K.S.
• DUDE! You rock. Thanks so much for putting that together. It is MIRACULOUS!
  -- C.J.
• ...lovely little unit it is too, takes a lot of the blood sweat & tears out of the task of transcription.
  -- C.H.
• I'm taking my first linguistics course and hit a serious note-taking roadblock when we started to use IPA. I take my notes on my Mac laptop and just couldn't keep up the insert->character->etc routine fast enough to catch what my prof. was talking about. Enter IPA Palette.
  -- L.G.
• I want to thank you very much for that software I was waiting for for quite a long time.
  -- B.S.
• just a word of thanks for a very nice ipa input device.... your palette has a made an odious task much more manageable.
  -- S.W.
• Hey, THANK YOU so much for creating this incredibly useful tool.
  -- D.M.
• Thanks again for the great tool. It is very helpful.
  -- T.R.