Plain and Simple Tools
A handful of small tools that each do one thing.
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.
Two ship today. If neither is a job you have, this one has nothing for you yet — the shelf is honest about being short.
How to set it up
- 01Open it and look at the shelf. Every tool says what it does, and what it will ask you for, before you tap it.
- 02Pin the ones you use to the tab bar — up to three of them. A tool you have never opened is never even started.
- 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 pick one you have already photographed, and get back the picture it was.
What it does
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.
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 converts colour film, black and white, and slides — a single frame or a whole strip. The conversion happens on the phone, and the result saves straight into your photos.
Permissions belong to the tools, not to the app. The shell asks for nothing. The camera is only ever on while Negatives is the screen you are looking at, and saving a photograph uses the add-only permission, which lets it put pictures into your library and never lets it see one. Two tests read the app's own source and fail the build if permission code appears outside a tool, or if the app declares a permission no tool asked for.
It has no way to reach the internet at all — not for updates, not for anything. That is checked by a test that fails the build if any code capable of it appears.