NFC Stickers
One of the neat new features of Shortcuts in iOS 13 and the newest series of iPhones is the use of NFC stickers. NFC stands for Near Field Communication and it used to be only available for Apple Pay. It allows you to tap your phone near a NFC chip to create an action.
With the new Automations tab in Shortcuts plus some NFC stickers (I got 10 for $6.99 on Amazon.com) you can do some pretty cool things. I have a sticker on my car dashboard where I can tap my phone and it finds all the music I’ve downloaded to the phone, starts playing the music on Shuffle, and then opens up the Music app. I put another sticker on my tripod which opens up the Scanner Pro app where I scan song books for playing piano using an iPad app called ForScore.
One caveat I have found with the stickers is that it doesn’t seem to work well when the sticker is placed on metal. I tried placing a sticker on my metal music stand and the phone couldn’t read it. I put it on my plastic tripod and it could.
It will be interesting and fun to see where else and what other applications I can use these stickers for.