Use this app to translate a 100-character message into binary code. The result is a string of 1s and 0s that a computer could understand. Have fun with friends and relatives by sending them a text or email written solely in binary format.

Perhaps you would like to ask a certain somebody: "Would you like to have coffee with me?" A computer would say "10101111101111111010111011001100100010000011110011101111111010101000001101100110100111010111100101010000011101001101111010000011010001100001111011011001010100000110001111011111100110110011011001011100101010000011101111101001111010011010000100000110110111001010111111".

Your friend (or yourself) could receive a binary message and translate those 1s and 0s into a textual (English) message. Send these messages back and forth to communicate like a computer.

Digital communication and the transfer of data by computers rely on the binary numbers 1 and 0 to encode alphanumeric characters. ASCII is the traditional method used to translate text into binary code.

Each textual character is represented as a 7-bit binary number. For example “app” is 110000111100001110000.

For extra entertainment, you can split the binary message into individual 7-bit codes and try guessing which textual character it represents. Move through the message one character at a time and undercover the original message.

The developer Michael E. Byczek is a certified Apple system administrator.