Gadgetory

in our last video on NFC we talked about some cool things you can do with NFC tags like sharing URLs sharing your business card sharing text just by embedding them into a relatively inexpensive NFC sticker well before that we talked about some really powerful things that you can do with NFC and profiles in CyanogenMod 9 but what if you're not running CyanogenMod 9 but you still want to be able to toggle on and off various things and settings on your phone or your tablet using NFC a lot of you wrote in and recommended NFC task launcher that's the app that we teased last time that's what we're going to talk about today this other app is called NFC task launcher and with it you can do some cool stuff kind of like what we did with the profiles over on CyanogenMod nightly but it's a little bit more difficult to set up the flipside so got some more fun stuff you can do with it and you don't need to have a custom ROM in fact you don't even need root except for a couple things that I'll show you but it won't show you and you'll see why so what I've done we can create a new tag and we've got a shameless plug over here to be able to buy tags so you know where you can buy them from if we wanted to create a new one we could it jumps us right over here we can create a new URI that's a universal resource indicator new vCard a new message new URL don't really know what the difference between those two are or a new switch switch is something where you can toggle between two two tasks essentially and then of course the all-important erase right down there so if we were to create a new task we can add an action in this action we can do lots of stuff we can set up some toggles turn on and off and whatnot that's great this Wi-Fi hotspot it doesn't want you toggle your Wi-Fi hotspot it lets you create a Wi-Fi hotspot not the one that's already pre-configured kind of funny this GPS on off you do have to have route which I do on this device and time that I've told it yes go ahead and do that it says hey this needs to be set as a super user or a system app rather and it attempts to do that tells me I need to reboot I do and well it never works again so I have to go in and remove it not from the Google Play Store but from the control panel of the settings and it's messy and painful and it's why this video took a little bit longer to get out because I had to figure all that out so in this build GPS don't miss with it or you'll be in the same pain that I was in and then of course mobile data on off just toggles cool stuff we're gonna leave that alone for now you can also set sounds and volumes of all of those including vibrate on off just like that always never when sound is off stuff that you're accustomed to back in here we can set the alarms very cool we can go to social media and post something on Twitter check in with Foursquare Yatta Yatta Yatta all the way down there we can't which is kind of cool you know you can program a tag to say check in with Google+ in your business and then have somebody tapped their NFC enabled Android phone to check in at Google+ if they have a Google+ account it's a lot of ifs huh down here we can select an action to launch an application open a URL or navigate to someplace display we can change the brightness notification rotation lots of cool stuff and then tasks or tasks tasker's not installed so it's not letting me do that you can go in and look at this if you've got some interesting tasks you want to share with us please do that in the comments over at pocketnow.com so we can know what you're doing with it kind of cool so what I've done is I've gone through here and I have created a couple different tasks Hey so see if I can get over to that so back on the home screen here are my recent ones I've got one for home and I've got one for work so let's go ahead and open home this is what it does it turns on Wi-Fi turns off Bluetooth sets my notification of my alarm volumes to seven that's all it does I can add more stuff if I wanted to but for now let's go ahead and finish just go ahead and place the tag against the back of the phone we'll use this one we're not gonna make that read only and it says okay that's done so this is our we said that was home I hope we said that was home we'll move that over to the side and now let's do one for work so when I get to work I want to disable Wi-Fi disable Bluetooth and post a tweet okay so let's go ahead and finish this one set that down there tagged written successfully great so here I am I've just arrived home I want to pre configure everything so set it down goes ahead and it runs the task sets the volumes tells me what I'm doing down here in toast notifications and when that's all said and done tells me up here that it ran tasks home very cool I go to sleep I get up in the morning I'm still at home I get in my car I go to work and I want to pre configure all of my work environments so get to work and I do that it finds the tag it disables Wi-Fi disables Bluetooth posts a tweet and by the way that tweet says something to be effective saving the world one line of HTML at a time something like that and then I have a notification up here that it ran tasks work so very cool you can set up kind of location-aware tasks for you just for you to do things to kind of mimic those profiles that you may not have on a stock device and you can do it all without needing to have anything custom or anything routed unless you want some of the more advanced features so both of these apps are available in the Google Play Store they're not free you're gonna be looking at about a buck two bucks somewhere in that range for one of them the other one is free and you can just use it like that let's come back home and there we go I don't have to worry about changing the volume toggling you know my Wi-Fi on/off because thanks to fun with NFC phone and my little sticker can do it all for me what do you think kind of cool stuff I hope you liked it this isn't the only thing this technology can do I'm sure there's other cool stuff but that's all I've done with it so far so what have you done with it head over to pocketnow.com and I want you to show me what you have done with your NFC stuff that's made it all kinds of cool this will go ahead and post that tweet using the Twitter API while it's doing that make sure you give the video a big thumbs up for pocket now it's showing off NFC I'm Joe Levi