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Show HN: I made a app that uses NFC as a physical switch to block distractions

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Re: Show HN: I made a app that uses NFC as a physical switch to block distractions

#41

Post by awaseem »

tigereyeTO wrote: post #21

I'm curious why the NFC tags are required at all? Can't you switch profiles on your phone without scanning an NFC tag already? Couldn't your app allow profile switching without requiring any NFC tags? It's not clear to me what the NFC tags add to this experience.

yeah 100% you can totally just use whats built into your phone, there's actually no need for any of these apps.

I found that having this physical deterrent keeps myself accountable, that's kinda the reason I built it and showcased it

Re: Show HN: I made a app that uses NFC as a physical switch to block distractions

#42

Post by awaseem »

filoleg wrote: post #16
awaseem wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can look into it, I tried to find a way to trigger Focus modes on iOS a profile being active and it seems they only allow you to read the state and no write or update it

I might be misreading what you are asking, but I just went into Shortcuts app and tried creating a new one, and there are both “Get Current Focus” and “Set Focus” actions. Is this what you were looking for? “Set Focus” allows setting any focus mode (including custom ones, you can see one in my screenshot) on/off. And if you choose “on”, there is an additional conditional afterwards (until manually turned off/until ti…

Yeah I can't find a clear way to do this from Swift and APIs apple exposes. I can be very wrong though and just didn't dig hard enough

Re: Show HN: I made a app that uses NFC as a physical switch to block distractions

#44

Post by awaseem »

ajoseps wrote: post #34
awaseem wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't noticed this on my personal use. It does seem like they use the family picker activity built into iOS. So maybe the issue is here as well.

It doesn't happen to every search. For me personally, if I try to search for apps starting with "r", it tends to crash. Not sure if it's related to the number of applications it needs to search for that match the prefix (for this case I was trying to block reddit).

Maybe its the list of app you have on your device? For me its fine but changes as the list is to long? Just a random guess though

Re: Show HN: I made a app that uses NFC as a physical switch to block distractions

#46

Post by filoleg »

awaseem wrote: post #42
filoleg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be misreading what you are asking, but I just went into Shortcuts app and tried creating a new one, and there are both “Get Current Focus” and “Set Focus” actions. Is this what you were looking for? “Set Focus” allows setting any focus mode (including custom ones, you can see one in my screenshot) on/off. And if you choose “on”, there is an additional conditional afterwards (until manually turned off/until ti…

Yeah I can't find a clear way to do this from Swift and APIs apple exposes. I can be very wrong though and just didn't dig hard enough

Ah, you were trying to do it through Swift/within an actual app, thanks for clarifying.

I think you are right, I couldn’t find a way to directly set status from within Swift, but there is a somewhat janky workaround I thought of. You should be able to have Shortcut hooks within your app (i.e., once the shortcut is triggered, it triggers an action within your app; or, inversed, have your app trigger a shortcut), and then have an official companion Shortcut for your users they can install with a single click. There might be other valid approaches, but they all seem to involve Shortcuts in some way.

However, it is definitely a suboptimal approach, compared to just doing it all within the app (which I couldnt find a way to do either).

Re: Show HN: I made a app that uses NFC as a physical switch to block distractions

#47

Post by [deleted] »

ajoseps wrote: post #22

I use the brick app: https://getbrick.app/ , and it works pretty well, but they have this weird bug where selecting certain apps on a block list crashes the app. They have a pop-up indicating that it's some apple-related bug, which I find kind of hard to believe. Is this something that also happens in your app?

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I made a app that uses NFC as a physical switch to block distractions

#50

Post by yieldcrv »

hecanjog wrote: post #28
tigereyeTO wrote: post #21

I'm curious why the NFC tags are required at all? Can't you switch profiles on your phone without scanning an NFC tag already? Couldn't your app allow profile switching without requiring any NFC tags? It's not clear to me what the NFC tags add to this experience.

It appealed to me since the way I block distractions is easy for me to unblock them, too. (like HN, I unblocked it to look for commentary on the bitbucket outage and now I'm reading random articles) If unblocking via software is easy too, this doesn't really work, but I could see giving the physical tag to a friend or leaving it somewhere in a different building causing enough friction for me to reconsider if I reall…

what I want is social screentime approval

on iphone, the built in screentime app is just a face id approval or your pin code, but what if instead you had to request approval and your friends on FindMy were the only people that could approve, by consensus

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