- Charge, Negatives, Steps to HA, Sort and Wake Light — a charger timed honestly, film turned back into photographs, steps on your own Home Assistant, stills filed by orientation, and a gradual sunrise in Apple Home.
- First open is a checklist of tools. Skip leaves an empty shelf. Cards are icon and name; pin up to three.
- Exactly one tool sends anything at all, and only to the Home Assistant you pointed it at yourself.
Where your data goesYour own device, your own Home Assistant, or your own Apple Home
Everything it does
Who this is for
For anyone who wants a small job done without installing a small app that wants an account in exchange. This is the one app here that is not about a single thing: a shelf that gains tools over time, where each tool does its job and nothing else.
Pick the tools you want on first open — or Skip, and the shelf stays empty until you add some. If none of them is a job you have, this one has nothing for you yet.
How to set it up
- 01First open is a checklist: icon and name for each tool. Check what you want; Done puts those on the shelf. Skip leaves it empty.
- 02The shelf is quiet — icon and name. Pin up to three to the tab bar. A tool you have never opened is never started, and never asks you for anything.
- 03Charge: plug the phone in and leave it a few minutes. It times how fast the battery is actually filling, and tells you whether that charger is any good.
- 04Negatives: point the camera at a film negative on a lightbox — or use a second phone's screen as the light — or pick one you have already photographed, and get back the picture it was.
- 05Steps to HA: scan the code your Home Assistant shows you, or paste the link, and your step count starts arriving on your dashboard.
- 06Sort: files stills into albums named Vertical and Horizontal. Squares are left where they are.
- 07Wake Light: a gradual sunrise on a light in your Apple Home.
What it does
- Charge
- Charge tells you roughly how many watts a charger, cable or car pad is delivering, and whether that counts as fast or slow. There is a Lock Screen tile for the last one you tested.
- Charge is honest about the wattage
- It is honest about the wattage, which is the part most apps are not. iOS does not tell an app how many watts are arriving — there is no way to ask, and any app showing you an instant figure is making it up. What can be done is timing how long the battery takes to gain a step of charge, which takes a few minutes and gets within about a fifth. The app shows that it is still measuring rather than inventing a number, and explains the method on the screen.
- Negatives
- Negatives converts colour film, black and white, and slides — a single frame or a whole strip. It reads the film's own clear edge to work out what the light was, which is the same step that removes the orange mask. The conversion happens on the phone, and the result saves straight into your photos. If you have no lightbox, the app will turn a second phone's screen into one.
- Steps to HA
- Steps to HA reads your daily step count from Apple Health and sends it to your own Home Assistant, so a family step chart on the dashboard keeps itself up to date. It never writes anything back to Health, and it reads nothing from Health but the step count.
- Sort
- Sort looks through the stills on this iPhone and files them into albums named Vertical and Horizontal. Squares are counted and left unfiled. The albums hold references — nothing is copied. Work stays on the device.
- Wake Light
- Wake Light writes a gradual sunrise into Apple Home as scenes and automations a hub runs. Brightness and warmth, on a light you choose. No sound.
- Permissions belong to the tools
- Permissions belong to the tools, not to the app. The shell asks for nothing. A tool asks at the moment you use the part of it that needs the permission. Charge asks for nothing at all. Tests read the app's own source and fail the build if permission code appears outside a tool, if the app declares a permission no tool asked for, or if a permission is requested from anything other than a control you operated.
- One tool sends, and only where you said
- One tool sends, and only to an address you supplied. Charge, Negatives, Sort, Wake Light and the Lock Screen tile cannot reach the network at all, which is checked by a test that fails the build if code capable of it appears anywhere but the Steps to HA folder — and by a second test that fails the build if a web address is written into the app anywhere except the single file holding the App Store links for Rate, Share and our other apps — which are handed to iOS to open, never fetched. Your Home Assistant address is kept in the phone's Keychain marked device-only, so it is not in iCloud and does not travel to a new phone.