I’m playing with adding an app badge to DrinkTrack showing this week’s units. This means the DrinkTrack icon in your home screen shows the number of units you’ve drunk this week, like the Mail app shows the number of unread mails you have.

This is perhaps a quintessential example of a feature itself being simple and the supporting infrastructure dwarfing the effort required. Adding the badge is two lines of code. Adding the obligatory settings screen will be dozens of lines of code along with a bunch of work in XCode’s UI creation tool, Interface Builder.

It doesn’t look like I mentioned here that Drinktrack was approved by Apple a couple of weeks ago. Head over to drinktrackapp.com to pick up a copy.

I’ve been using the app for just over a month now. I think it hits the sweet spot I was aiming for in the compromise between exactitude and painless drink logging. 1.1 is going through Apple’s review process, with a couple of small but nice updates.

Over Christmas I spent a few days writing another iPhone app. With New Year’s resolutions fast approaching and overindulgence of wine fresh in my mind, I decided an application to see how much I typically drank might be useful.

I took a look on the app store and identified a vacuum: a nice looking, efficient way to record my consumption. Drinktrack was born.

The dark and refined UI doesn’t light up your face in a ghostly white when you’re sat in a trendy bar noting down your drink. Like One to Watch, it’s designed to be brutally fast to get information into the app. Four taps and some fun swipes.

One of the things Matt Gemmel recommends is adding some contact info to your iPhone’s lock screen image. I like this idea, as it makes it simpler to get your phone back if you misplace it.

I just noticed that OSX allows you to add a message to your MacBook’s lock screen too. Just look under System Preferences → Security & Privacy → General, check the Show a message when the screen is locked and click the Set lock message… button. I added a simple message: “If you have found this Mac, please email [my email address]. Thanks!”

UBS and LIBOR: Horribly rotten, comically stupid

Though it’s left the headlines, the LIBOR scandal keeps growing and growing. More and more banks are found to have been diddling the system.

The interchanges published by the FSA also reveal a comical stupidity among people who, if judged by their above-average pay, ought to have been expected to display above-average insight and intelligence. Sadly, they showed neither.

I find the apparent abject stupidity of many of those involved to be breath-taking.