Two ideas for adding NFC support to Homebox. Putting them out there to evaluate interest!

[danielrosehill]

What is the problem you are trying to solve with this feature?

I originally picked up a label maker for the purpose of writing tags. Over time I began checking out NFC as an option. And while it's more expensive, over time I've come to prefer it. I've noticed that the labels can degrade fairly quickly. And when you're trying to quickly identify which box an object belongs in, it's faster to tap an NFC tag than it is to go into your camera app, scan a barcode and then get to the item URL. Both approaches have merits, and I think, for many, a parallel approach would make sense.

The issue is that writing NFC tags using Homebox is a bit cumbersome. My process for doing this on desktop requires copying the URL onto the clipboard and then writing the tag. On Android, it's basically the same process (I access Homebox as the PWA). And if I'm not scanning barcodes, I need to enter the ID prepended by a hashtag in order to find it from a large inventory.

What is the solution you are proposing?

I have two ideas that I think would really make this easier, and I'd be happy to attempt to work on them myself as an experimentary project (disclaimer: development skills basic, but always improving!)

1: Button for adding item URL to clipboard to streamline tag creation.

A first and very simple one would be a button to copy the item URL - perhaps next to the QR code button . This would just copy the URL onto the clipboard. But given the way NFC tags are created, this would actually save a bunch of time because you could just hit a button instead of having to go into share, copy URL every single time.

2: Standalone tool for creating tags from barcodes

The other idea I've had is perhaps a tool in the app itself intended to streamline this process. This would be intended to speed up the workflow of people who are migrating over from barcodes to NFC or rolling out a dual approach for important items in the inventory.

One text field for enter item ID. Unlike the main search, this wouldn't have the requirement for a hashtag to speed up the flow. Logic would be needed to map this onto the correct item ID in the inventory.

Item title could be (dynamically) displayed so that the user is sure that they're getting the right URL and the URL for the item displayed with again a simple button to copy it onto the clipboard.

I'm not familiar enough with how Android implements NFC tag rating and what intents are available, but a brilliant feature here would be a button like "write to NFC" which both copies it to clipboard, then opens up the default NFC tag writing app, and perhaps even ultimately writes the tag itself.

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What alternatives have you considered?

Possible to do all this manually but it's a slow and clunky process that doesn't really work well at scale.

Additional context

No response

Contributions

• I have searched through existing issues and feature requests to see if my idea has already been proposed.
• If this feature is accepted, I would be willing to help implement and maintain this feature.
• If this feature is accepted, I'm willing to sponsor the development of this feature.

[tankerkiller125]

The first part will be part of the next version as part of #389