The NHS has come up with its own contact-tracing app, “NHS COVID-19”, and there are already plans for it to be trialled with key workers on the Isle of Wight.

However, it’s doesn’t use the more privacy focussed solution that Apple and Google have come up with, but rather a centralised one. Where the data about the tracked interactions will be sent. Although it doesn’t seem exactly clear what that data is. It could simply be a list of unique IDs that the device has come into contact with, along with your own ID. Or it could also include other sensitive information. Who knows? All I know is that, that question will always exist while it uses a custom solution.

Privacy is not only the potential issue with the app though. My concern mainly is with its effectiveness. This is how they claim it works:

• Once you’ve installed the app on your phone, it can detect (using Bluetooth) if other phones that are also running the app are nearby.
• Importantly, the app knows how close it has been to other phones running the app, and for how long. This allows the app to build up an idea of which of these phones owners are most at risk.
• If you then use the app to report that you’re experiencing coronavirus symptoms, all the phones that have been nearby will receive an alert from the app.
• Users reading the alert will now know they may have been near a person with coronavirus, and can then self-isolate.
• If the NHS later discovers that your diagnosis was wrong (and your reported symptoms are not coronavirus), the other users will receive another alert, letting them know if they can stop self-isolating.

My questions would be the following:

• How often can it run? If it’s just an app with no special entitlements, then surely it is bound my the background restrictions like most other apps.
• If it’s monitoring it relatively often, then surely even Bluetooth Low Energy will have an impact on the battery level?
• What happens if a device is put into low power mode? Is all tracing stopped? Because surely background tasks aren’t run as often then.
• Can you really trust it to trace every contact you’ve had? For example if you sit next to someone with COVID-19 for 10 minutes, but for some reason the background task to monitor Bluetooth doesn’t run, then does it really do it’s job?

And I’d just like to point out the PDF that NHS made to explain the differences between a decentralised and centralised model. The only difference I see, is that their centralised model also includes an “NHS clinical algorithm” to detect the risk posed from each of your interactions.

I for one, will not be using any contact-tracing app, that doesn’t follow the solution that Apple and Google have come up with. Because, apart from wanting to control the data yourself, and possibly even retrieve more data than necessary, there’s no real gain to use a centralised approach.

Another mystery has finally been uncovered, and that is the recipe to IKEA’s amazing meatballs, and the cream sauce that goes with them.

Since we can’t go to IKEA anymore to get hold of them, they shared the recipe on Twitter. And just in the style you would expect:

I’ll definitely be making these myself.

Matt Birchler:

I’m reminded of Dieter Rams’ 10th principle of good design: Good design is as little design as possible. The vibe I get from many tech YouTube videos, and this one in particular, is the exact opposite. Why is Android better? Because it has more X and the hardware comes in Y variants. So many arguments involve the word “more” but so few involve the word “better” which saddens me.

Precisely this. Too many times I hear Android being better than iOS because it has “more” of something. Sure, it’s bound to be better at certain things than iOS, but that’s not what typically gets talked about.

When writing about apps, it’s very common that you’ll need to combine screenshots together if you’re trying to capture a rather long page. One common case of this is when you’re trying to capture a screenshot of a Shortcut, which is why I looked for an app like Picsew, when I was getting screenshots for my recent article about how I’m using Data Jar to help writing link posts.

I’ve used apps like Tailor or LongScreen before, but I found LongScreen to be hard to deal with, and Tailor only support the iPhone. So I explored the App Store trying to find a solution for the iPad, and luckily I found Picsew.

Similar to the previously mentioned apps, Picsew has the ability to automatically combine multiple pictures together. But it didn’t seem to work well with the screenshots I took of some shortcuts. This is where the more “manual” option comes in. And I think that option is actually much more impressive than the automatic feature.

So after you select the photos you want to combine (in the correct order), and choose either vertical or horizontal, you use a pretty cool editor to adjust the position of each screenshot where you wish it to join the next one.

It’s quite intuitive actually, and was much easier than I thought it would be. You just tap on the join you wish to exit, and “push” the content towards the join until you’re happy.

Video: Picsew Edit Photo Join

You can also crop the entire photo inside the app as well, which is pretty handy as when you get a pretty large photo, it’s hard to do fine adjustments in the Photos app.

Video: Picsew Crop Photo

Anyway, I found it to be a very handy utility. So if you’re looking for an app that can join various photos together, or if you’ve used another one previously, I’d recommend checking out Picsew.

Download Picsew from the App Store

John Gruber:

Regular edition iPhones are numbered. Yes, that’s not quite true of the primordial models. The 2007 original iPhone was just “iPhone”, and the “3G” in the second and third models stood for the cellular networking technology. But starting with the iPhone 4, regular edition iPhones have all been numbered. Higher-numbered iPhones both look new on the outside and offer improved technology on the inside.

The iPhone SE’s are special editions because they fall outside this continuum. They look like phones from several years prior, and some of their technology is several years old as well. But other aspects of their technology are state of the art (e.g. chip systems) or nearly so (cameras).

I’ve read some takes on the new iPhone SE, and it’s clear that some people really have no clue what the device is, or who it’s for.

One of the few I’ve seen that make sense to me is John Gruber’s. What I like the most is that it’s not just a product review, he talks about the meaning behind the naming, what market it fits into, and some fascinating comparisons and observations regarding the SE line and the typical “main” iPhone line.

I’m not going to be buying an iPhone SE, but I would certainly say that if I didn’t upgrade from the 7 Plus to my current XS, then it would be a serious thought in my head.

However, in a similar way to how the iPhone XR was such a great deal, and offered the best iPhone for so many people, and at a much better price, this new iPhone SE takes over that role in my opinion. Although depending on wheat comes out later this year, that status may only last for 6 months or so. Then again, having such a capable iPhone SE in the lineup, allows Apple to push the rest of the phones even further.

Last night I spent some time reading on my iPad, and I noticed a few articles that I might want to link to from my blog. Except I didn’t want to start creating drafts in iA Writer, or doing any manual work. I just wanted a way to remind myself that I want to link to this at some point.

I started to think that I could simply create a reminder in the Reminders app (I’ve switched from Things), possibly with the URL as a note so I could get back to it when I needed it again. However, that would require me to then later load the URL, and fetch the details from it. And seeing as I would have had the article loaded at the time of reading, it made more sense to store this data, and then be able to reference it at a later date.

So I came up with an idea of two shortcuts, one to store relevant data about the article I wanted to reference, and then another which I could use to select from the list and kick off a draft in iA Writer.

That’s when I thought about using the recently released data store app, Data Jar, which is a fantastic tool for storing all kinds of data.

Store Link Post Idea

To start off, the Shortcut I created to do the initial data storing and reminder creation was relatively simple. It accepts input from the Share sheet, in the form of a Safari web page, and then has just three actions:

1. Add a new reminder with the title of the article to my blog list.
2. Create a dictionary with four pieces of data – the title, URL, any text that was selected that I want to quote, and also the author. Although I’ve found the author to not be very reliable.
3. Store this dictionary at the end of my drafts list in Data Jar.

Download the Shortcut: Add to Drafts List

Starting a Link Post

This shortcut is a bit more complex, as it has to do quite a few things:

• Retrieve the list of link post ideas from Data Jar.
• Show the list, and allow the user (me) to select an option.
• Transform the various pieces of data into a link post outline.
• Create a new document in iA Writer.

It’s a bit long, so I’ll put the long screenshot below, and then explain why it may seem pretty complicated for what it does, and the things I had to work around.

To start off, the shortcut gets the list of drafts from Data Jar. This contains all the drafts that have been saved.

It then does a little transformation with that data, using a temporary variable in Data Jar. It clears the value for the specific key I’m going to use, and then it loops through the list of articles, and extracts the title and the index of each article into a new list. This is because we need to show the list of articles, and also perform operations on the specific article that was selected.

The temporary list is then displayed, and from the chosen article, the Index is then used to fetch the complete article data from Data Jar. That includes the title, author, page selection (snippet), and the URL.

Once that data is extracted, the page section is formatted as a Markdown Blockquote via Text Case (my app), and then it’s put together with the rest of the data to form a basic link post outline.

Finally, the outline is URL encoded and opened as a new document in iA Writer via the URL scheme.

Download the Shortcut: Start Link Post From Draft

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These two shortcuts are simple in theory, and to be honest I could have achieved the same result with less complexity, and maybe even without Data Jar. However, I like that the storing and kicking off a link post in iA Writer are separate processes. Because it allowed for more flexibility in the future and also doesn’t distract me at the time of reading an article. Which was one of the big reasons for me making these.

I really liked using Data Jar for these as well, so I hope I can make use of it again in future shortcuts!

Links

Find the apps used, and the shortcuts below:

• Data Jar
• iA Writer
• Text Case
• Add to Drafts List Shortcut
• Start Link Post From Draft Shortcut

Text Case is getting it’s second update of the year (as you can probably tell by the version number), and while it’s not a big one, it contains one fix and support for pointers in iPadOS.

The fix is for the Sentence Case format, which by default capitalises any word that comes after a full stop. However, it didn’t apply this rule after question marks and exclamation marks. This has now been fixed.

Because of the new pointer support in iPadOS, I’ve added a slight hover state for the formats in the main list, and also other parts of the interface. A side benefit of me doing this, is that this also works in the macOS version as well. Simply because that is a Catalyst app. It reminds me that without Catalyst, I probably wouldn’t have made a macOS app for Text Case at all. But now I get to develop essentially for three platforms at once, the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

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Find Text Case:

• iOS/iPadOS App Store
• Mac App Store
• Text Case Website

I was just out in my garden with my cat, Jay, seeing as that’s as far as I can go at the moment. But he was walking up and down one of the fences, so I decided to grab my camera[1] and take a few shots of him.

What I’ve now learned, is that I really like the colours at this time of night. Or more specifically as blue hour, (as opposed to the more commonly known golden hour), which happens in the twilight ether just before sunrise or just after sunset when the sky has a really blue tint.

Anyway, that’s a good enough excuse for me to post some photos here on my blog. Enjoy.

Now practically everyone is in lockdown, everyone seems to be having fun sending around various quizzes. My family have been sharing various emoji quizzes between ourselves, so I decided to make a few myself.

I’ve got quite a bit of spare time, so I actually made the effort to design a proper layout, and look reasonably good.

Each quiz has just 10 emoji phrases, and you’ve got to guess what they represent. The four different topics I chose were:

• Movies
• TV Shows
• UK Landmarks
• English Football Teams (Based on nicknames)

I’ve got an image for each quiz, and also a version including the answers. I’ll include each of the below, but for the answers you’ll have to click on the relevant answers link.

Movies

Questions

Questions and Answers

TV Shows

Questions

Questions and Answers

UK Landmarks

Questions

Questions and Answers

English Football Teams

Questions

Questions and Answers

I’ll start by saying, I haven’t worn my Apple Watch in about two weeks. There was no big decision when I stopped wearing it, but I’ve noticed that over the past month or so, I would just be less bothered about wearing it. So much so, the tan line on my wrist has near-enough disappeared.

I know it was about two weeks because that’s when my heart rate data has ended on the Health app. But it occurred regularly before that, where I would wake up and instantly grab my phone and watch. But I would sit down with a coffee, put my phone and my watch both on the side, and never pay any attention to my watch until it was time to put it on charge again.

My original lack of interest with the watch started I think when I wasn’t going to work. Because that’s probably the only time that I felt I needed constant access to everything. Whether it’s the time, the weather, access to music that’s playing from a device just in my pocket, or all the notifications that I would instantly dismiss.

Now when I think about what I can actually gain from the Apple Watch, I’m not sure if I’m ever really going to wear it regularly again.

Here is a list of all the things I’ve ever done with an Apple Watch:

• Get the time.
• Pause/Play/Skip music/podcast.
• Track a workout. (Not a real workout, just small walks)
• Checked the weather. (Not that it matters to me that much, my outfit doesn’t change all year-round)
• Tracked my sleep. (It didn’t take long for this to stop)
• Played a game called Field Day for a while.
• Triggered a few interactions with Pokémon GO.
• Checked football scores.

And that’s about all I’ve ever done.

Now for what I use my watch for, just before I started to not wear it as often:

• Get the time.

I’m starting to think I don’t need a smart watch anymore.

No music/podcasts are being controlled on the watch anymore, because I have AirPods that can do that. I don’t track workouts because they were never real workouts anyway. I don’t play Field Day or Pokémon GO anymore. And if I want to check anything like the weather, football scores, text messages, I just take my phone out of my pocket.

I’ve started to actually like not having my wrist being the interface between myself and the internet. And I’ve grown tired about being notified about things that I just don’t care about.

Maybe I’ll eventually put my watch back on charge and then I can see if there is any remaining use for it. But for now I’ll be keeping it off. Maybe I’ll even think about buying an analogue watch.