Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this escapade let me show you how you canuse your iPhone with these NFC tags. MacMost is introduce into you thanks to a greatgroup of more than 500 backers. Go to MacMost.com/ patreon. There you can read more about it, join usand do exclusive material. So what’s an NFC tag? Well they’re these little stickers or theycould be little placards or just about anything and it has a bit of electronics in it. NFC stands for Near Field Communication andit’s technology that allows to use your iPhone with Apple Pay and other structures. But these little labels are the simplest formof this use. You can actually use the Shortcuts app toreact to when you bring your iPhone near one of these tags.There are also ways to made data on these tagsso your iPhone or somebody else’s iPhone automatically reacts to them. This is a strip of NFC tags I got on Amazon. I think they cost like$ 6 for 10. You can get them even cheaper if you buy more. There are tons of them. Really search for NFC tags. If you actually view a flashlight up to thetag they become a little transparent and you can see the actual circuitry inside. To use them all you need to do is bring itnear your phone. This can be a sticker on the wall and youtouch your telephone to it.The particularly top side now. They simply work within an inch and a half ofthe tag. Thus the end, the near, in Near Field Communication. So one highway to use a NFC tag with your iPhoneis to create a personal automation in the Shortcuts app. You can have that automatically move when youbring a call next to your iPhone or your iPhone touching the label. So let’s go into the Shortcuts app and switchto Automations. We can create a personal automation.Then is you go towards the bottom you’ll seeNFC is one of the options. We’ll hand-picked that. Now the first thing we need to do is scana tag. So I’m going to sound the Scan button thereand it’s going to say Ready to Scan. Now I’m going to bring this tag right up againstthe top of my iPhone here and formerly it recognizes it, it sounds up a little Name This Tag. So I’m just going to do a Assessment Tag name andhit Okay. Then I made the next button there at the topand now I can add Actions.So let’s go and add a simple thing that juststarts a Timer. So I’ll go into the Clock app now and lookat the actions for Clock. I can say Start a Timer. Let’s say 10 seconds just as a demo. But this could be something for 30 instants. Say a label you want to tap your iPhone to thentake a nap or remind yourself in 30 instants it’s time for dinner. Something like that. So this could be my 30 instant timer label thatI can sounds. Time keep it simple like that. I’ll do Next and you can see it’s setup forwhen Test Tag is detected. Do, Start Timer. Now I can turn on Ask Before Running. So let’s make this an automatic automationhere.I’ll turn this off and now it should workautomatically. In order for this to be active I have to hitDone to finish. Now I can return to my Home screen and let’sgive it a try. In my test if the phone is asleep it doesn’twork. It has to be woken up so you have to havesome movement because the screen has to be on. But it doesn’t need to be opened. It will work whether it’s locked or unlocked. Let’s experiment it out here. I’m going to touch the tag to the phone andyou can see it gives me a notification there that something is running. So now it should be time 10 seconds beforethe alarm goes off. There you can see the Timer went off and Ihave the Stop button and I can listen a seem as well. I can return to Shortcuts here and I can gointo the Automation and change what it does without altering the label. So I can go in here and I can add more things. I can make it do something different. I can have it get a playlist, for example, and play it.I can have it send themes. I can do anything I could do in the Shortcutsapp. I can have prompted now. I are also welcome to simply add Run Shortcuts. So I can have an existing Shortcut and havethis Shortcut here simply led the existing Shortcut. So the existing one could also be linked tosay a Siri command or a Home screen button and now I contribute this personal automation thatwill run it when I touch the label. Now one of the big advantages here is thatthese can run automatically. If you’ve been wants to play with personalautomations one of the mortifications is you can’t set one triggered by a locationor by a time to run automatically. They will ask you for allow. You still have to take that extra gradation toactually have it extend. But with these calls it runs automaticallybecause you’re already taking an action by hit your telephone to the tag. So you can do things like having one by thefront doorway and you touch your iPhone to it and it turns off or on the sunlights in yourhouse.You can have one in your car that when youtouch it it starts representing your playlist. You can have one by your office door thatwhen you leave it will text individual that you’re on your style. Now a second way to use NFC tags is to storedata on the label. When you do that in a certain way it can triggera phone to take a certain action. It doesn’t have to be something that you programmedinto your telephone before. So it’s your phone or anybody else’s phone. For speciman you were able to accumulate a webpage URLon a NFC tag. If somebody touches their phone to it, ifthey have NFC on their phone, it will then prompt them whether it is possible they want to openup that page. There are other things you can do as well.You need to grab an app to do this. If you can search for NFC in the App Storeyou’re going to come up with a ton of stuff. I grabbed this one because it’s mostly freebut I didn’t really liken it against others so I don’t know if it’s the very best. But it will work for the purposes of my show. So when I go into this tool here I can doa bunch of different things. I can Speak a call. I can Write to a tag. Let me write to a tag. Now I have to add record. So I can add numerous bits of data to the tag. Now labels have differing amounts of reminiscence. So if you’re going to lean a good deal of stuff ona call you may want to pay attention to what type of tag you buy.Whether it can store a lot of bytes. If you’re going to do something simple itprobably doesn’t matter. Let’s contribute a record and you can see all thesedifferent things that you can add to the tag. You can add a piece to text. You can add an URL. You can add a link to a folder, an email, contact, telephone number. All sorts of things.These will all trigger different things onyour telephone. Let’s do the simplest one and add an URL. Then I’m going to just set a simple URL inhere. Then I’m going to tap the okay button at thetop. So now I’m all ready to write to this. So I’m going to sound the Write button hereand it’s going to say Ready to Scan. I’m going to do the call and framed it up againstit. Watch what happens when I touch the phoneto this tag. It’s going to come up with this little alertat the top and I can tap it and it will go to this webpage.Now if I want to change what the label doesI’m going to have to change things. I’m going to have to go back and you can seethere is Other and I can Erase the call. Then formerly I’ve erased it I can write differentthings to the tag. In this app what you’re going to write staysthere. So I can actually platform several differenttags to it. There’s also the capabilities needed now to add a WiFinetwork. You can give the authentication there. So in other words the password for the WiFinetwork. So what I plan to do is program one of thesetags with my WiFi network for my house and placed it right by the front door. The next time a client comes over and wantsthe WiFi password all I’ve got to do is tell them, Touch your telephone to this tag. It will instantly adjust their phone up withmy WiFi network. So there are a lot of different things thatyou can do with these calls. If I had a store or coffee shop I could seehaving one of these setup with an URL to signup for my newsletter and beings could just touchtheir telephone to it when they checkout and it makes them to that sheet and they are unable entertheir email address.You could also use the email record therefor client feedback. So it automatically starts them up with anemail to be presented to you with a certain subject. All they need to do is type the body textand stumbled Send. You can also use the location tag there andthey could tap the little notify that shows up and it takes them to a spot on themap. So you can actually get a bunch of these andsetup a recreation scavenger hunt for your friends where they go from location to location lookingfor one of these and going the next locating from the call. So “thats a lot” of fun things that youcould do with NFC tags. Either setting up a shortcut to have one ofthese work for your telephone exclusively or setting up one that prompts an war onanybody’s phone. Now I should note that you need a fairly recentiPhone to use NFC tags. They work on the iPhone 7, 8, 10, or 11 poses. Programming them with things like URLs, sites, or WiFi passwords should also work for most recent android phones.
