Tag: Apple Shortcuts

A Few Ways I’m using NFC Tags Lately

Leave a comment

With iOS 13 came the ability to natively trigger actions via NFC tags using Shortcuts. This seems cool, and it is, but figuring out what to use them for is another story. I knew they’d be handy but handy for what?

It took browsing a bunch of examples from other people online before I knew what to use my own for, so I figured I’d share a few of mine today.

For brushing my teeth

Call me insane, but I now own a Bluetooth toothbrush. Was it worth it? Probably not, but I enjoy the feedback I get from it. It turns out even as an adult, I occasionally do brush too fast or too harshly. The catch is because it’s Bluetooth, it only works if the app is open. (Note to anyone buying smart devices, always pick one that supports Wifi over Bluetooth so you don’t need to worry about opening an app every time). I’m ashamed to admit that remembering to brush my teeth twice a day is sometimes hard enough. Remembering to open an app beforehand, is just one more thing to remember.

Insert NFC tag.

I have a white NFC sticker stuck to the light switch in my bathroom. Because the switch plate is white, it’s nearly undetectable unless you know it’s there, but tap my phone to it and my toothbrush app opens automatically. It’s easy, and I dare say almost a little fun to do.

For turning the light I forgot to turn off from bed

There’s nothing worse than climbing into bed only to realize you left a light on. What’s worse is when the light is in another room. Rather than screaming “Alexa, turn off the light”…

Insert NFC tag.

Once again, I have a white NFC sticker stuck to my headboard. My bed is also white, so it blends in. The shortcut it triggers does a few things by launching a menu, but one of the most useful things it does is allow me to turn off the lights in the living room without getting back out of bed. One of the other useful items on the menu is for turning our white noise machine on or off.

For tracking my hydration

This one actually makes me smile a bit every time I use it because it feels a little bit like magic. I have a coaster on my desk at work. Little does anyone know, it’s got superpowers.

If you didn’t guess… Insert NFC tag.

Unlike the others, this isn’t a sticker. It’s just a plastic NFC chip sitting under the coaster. Whenever I finish a drink, I can tap my phone to the coaster, and via the NFC chip, I’m prompted with a shortcut to select my drink type and an amount to log with Waterminder. The shortcut is actually faster than logging water with the app itself or even the widget I have on my phone because I can simply type rather than scroll to select an amount.

I have a few other NFC stickers around such as the one on the light switch by my front door to turn all the smart lights in the house on or off, but I do have a few other ideas brewing, such as putting one on our back door frame to turn on our patio lights. I also recently purchased a set of black NFC stickers, which I intend to use in my car to launch directions and/or open Castro/Spotify. Last but not least I plan to put one of the NFC chips into one of the arms of our couch (don’t worry, they have removable covers) to trigger things like turning on our tv, fireplace, and lights from the sofa.

If you have creative uses for NFC tags, I’d love to hear them.

Creating Project Templates for Things 3 with Shortcuts and Keyboard Maestro

9 Comments

If there’s one thing I’ve missed since moving from OmniFocus to Things, it’s the ability to use project templates. It’s hard to beat Omnifocus’s support for the TaskPaper format. Project templates can be created in a flash and added by simple text expansion tools.

That being said, it’s also hard to beat the design of Things, and for that reason, I set out to learn how to convert my templates.

In migrating to Things, I decided a number of them would be better off just scheduled as repeating projects in Things, which cut my list in half before I even started. Working at a university, most of my work tends to repeat each semester, but the actual dates of semesters tend to fluctuate slightly, so my projects tend to do so as well. I can, however, count on those projects happening roughly around the same weeks each year. With Omnifocus 2, it wasn’t possible to schedule a project to repeat yearly on say the first Monday of November, but it was in Things 3. It’s worth noting that repeats like this were added to Omnifocus 3, so if I were still using it, I’d have moved these templates back into Omnifocus too.

Unlike Omnifocus’s TaskPaper format, templates in Things 3 are possible through a URL scheme. If you’re interested in testing it out, Cultured Code has a really nice Link Builder to help you get started. While this works great for static projects and actions, it doesn’t let me create the variable templates I was trying to create.

Naturally, I turned to the trusty Keyboard Maestro to see if I could pass variables into a Things URL. It turns out Keyboard Maestro’s variable format doesn’t really get along well with Things’ URL scheme though. All those percentage signs make for a confused mess. I even found a post on Keyboard Maestro’s forums asking for Keyboard Maestro to play nicely with Things URLs, which I nervously bumped 8 months later out of desperation.

After hours of frustration trying to get it to work and searching relentlessly for a solution, I stumbled upon a blog post that used Alfred instead. While I was at least able to get this working, entering the variables was nowhere near as user-friendly as having the dialog boxes that I had been used to while using Keyboard Maestro. That being said, if you’re an Alfred fan, this may be just what you’re looking for!

Things Templates Using Shortcuts

At some point, I conceded that Keyboard Maestro wasn’t going to happen and tried my hand at creating them with Apple Shortcuts. Let me just say Shortcuts handled Things URLs beautifully. Having little to show for all my time dabbling with Shortcuts other than my Spotify playlist shortcut, I was surprised, to say the least.

The basic shortcut is only 5 actions (I’ve used my Book Project to help illustrate.):

  1. Ask for Input (e.g. What the’s title of the book?)
  2. Replace text (This finds spaces in whatever you inputted and replaces them with %20)
  3. Set Variable (In this case, to bookTitle) – I’m going to skip forward onto the remainder of the shortcut here for simplicity’s sake, but it’s safe to say you could keep reusing steps 1-3 to prompt for as many variables as you need. You can use them for any field supported by the URL scheme including (Notes, Tags, Deadlines, etc.) so there’s plenty of room for exploration.
  4.  URL (This is where you’d put your URL you got from Cultured Code’s Link Builder unless you’ve got the URL scheme down to which I’ll say Kudos! This is also where you’ll be replacing the fill-in areas with your variables from earlier. Admittedly this is kind of a pain because the URL is long, and the URL field in Shortcuts is a single line, but copy and paste works quite well if you’re using a keyboard.)
  5. Open URL – You’re done.

I was able to recreate all of my templates in Shortcuts fairly quickly by duplicating and then modifying this shortcut, and I can easily run them from Spotlight by typing in the name of the shortcut.

While I was glad to have my templates back in some form, it was fiddly having to grab my iPhone or iPad to generate a template when I was already on my computer.

Back to trying to get Keyboard Maestro to work…

Things Templates with Keyboard Maestro

Thankfully in the months since I’d bumped that post on the Keyboard Maestro forum, a kind soul by the name of gglick came to my rescue. (Note to self: Pay better attention to forum replies.) I really cannot take any credit for this because he or she really did the leg work to make everything work. Even better, the way it’s set up makes the template super easy to update – even easier than Omnifocus’s TaskPaper format in my opinion.

I’ll give gglick credit by linking to the post if you’re interested in the macro, but in short, the macro is 4 actions:

  1. Prompt the user for input (Note: Unlike with Shortcuts, you can add all the variables you want in this step.)
  2. Set Variable to Text (In this case, Keyboard Maestro is going to be doing most of the link formatting, so you can pretty much write out all your tasks in plain text with the exception of a few bits like the variables and the starting syntax.)
  3. Filter Variable with Percent Encode for URL (This turns all the spaces into %20 like Step 2 of the Shortcut earlier.)
  4. Open URL (Note: the URL you’re opening is actually the Variable you made in Step 2.)

As I did with Omnifocus, I’ve set up a macro palette to display the templates that I can trigger via the same keyboard shortcut (⌘+F4) I used with Omnifocus saving me from having to retrain any muscle memory. All this is is a macro containing the action “Show Macro Group”.

I know I spent countless hours trying to figure this out, so I’m sharing this in hopes it saves someone else time. Happy templating!

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash