Cryptogrammer

Cryptogrammer is a Mac shareware toy from Borkware that helps untangle the letter-substitution cryptograms found in newspapers and puzzle magazines. Type or load a puzzle, click a letter to assign a guess, and watch every matching cipher letter update at once across the working text.

What it does

Cryptogrammer treats a cryptogram as a live mapping. Pick any cipher letter, type the plaintext you suspect, and the substitution propagates through the entire puzzle so you can immediately judge whether the resulting words look like English.

Sample puzzles included

The download ships with 26 sample cryptograms so you can start solving without typing in your own. You can also paste in any puzzle of your own and save partially solved work to return to later.

Letter frequencies helper

A Letter Frequencies column sits alongside the puzzle as a built-in cheat sheet, showing how often each cipher letter occurs so you can prioritise common English letters such as E, T, A and O when guessing.

Reflowing layout

The puzzle and worksheet panes reflow automatically as you resize the window, so Cryptogrammer adapts to whatever screen real estate you give it rather than forcing a fixed layout.

Source available

Borkware distributed Cryptogrammer 1.0 as a small compressed disk image and also released the underlying Xcode project, so curious Mac developers can read the source alongside the binary.