How Apple Made Automating Everything with QR Codes SO Simple!

QR codes they are everywhere in the next few minutes I will show you how easy it is to not only create a QR code for yourself on your iPhone iPad and Mac using the building tools from Apple but also how you can use this to not only link to any website but also how to automatically insert your contact infos via a QR code on your business card or your signature and how to easily let your guests join a Wi-Fi without ever needing a password ever again using only a QR code and also how to start any app or shortcut on your Apple devices using a QR code all of this is done easy and effortlessly with just three quick actions using the Apple shortcuts app if you want to find out how it is done stick with me you know QR codes are everywhere nearly all stores and brands are now using them to make you visit their websites Instagram accounts Etc also during the pandemic we've seen this come up for lots of services like booking a covert test registering a visit in a hospital or even getting the menu in a restaurant so turning a web link into a QR code is something we've all experienced in the last years but do you know that there are lots of cool automation possibilities with QR codes and that creating these on your Apple devices are free and easy you won't even need a third-party app or website which is great for your privacy everything you need to create amazing QR code is already included in your iPhone iPad or Mac so let me show you first how you can create a simple QR code generator with no programming skills using only three actions then I will show you three great examples what you can do with it besides opening up web pages so let's get to it creating your own QR code is easy on your Apple devices you don't even need an app for that it is all built in all you need is the shortcuts app by the way all of these shortcuts will be linked to in the description below so let's start with creating a general QR code generator shortcut where will QR shortcut only needs three actions first you enter the text you want to turn into a QR code this can be any kind of text but mostly it is used with web links so if you want to turn the link into a QR code you first get the link second the second action turns this into a QR code third the third action shows the QR code done it is that easy I promise you that this will be easy right so let's build this in the shortcuts app create a new shortcut and give it a name I call it generate QR code I'm using the iPad app here but you can just as easily do this on the Mac or iPhone these shortcuts will work on all three platforms next you need to select on the right side the actions you want to use we select the ask action type in ask in the search box and click on ask for input you leave it at ask for text which is the type you want to enter and after the width you enter the prompt I'll use enter text for QR code here the next action you select from the actions menu is generate QR code just type QR code in the search box and click on generate QR code notice that it will automatically connect this to the previous statement indicated by The Thin Line and it is shown that this step will generate a QR code from the provided input which is just what we wanted third the last step is to show the QR code Type show results in the search box to the right and select the show result action again it will connect to the previous action and it will select the QR code as the result it will show done that was easy right leave it a shortcut and now you can use it by tapping on the shortcut in the old shortcuts pane it will ask for text and you can enter anything here but obviously QR codes are most often used for links to web pages so let's enter one I'm pasting the link to my YouTube page it will then create and show the QR code now I can either get another device like an iPhone and use the camera to select a QR code which will immediately bring me to my YouTube page but I can also do this on the device Itself by tapping on the QR code which opens it up as an image then long press on the image and select open in Safari you will not see any changes but press done to get out of the image and done again to close the shortcut and then you will see that Safari went to that page by the way you can also in the image save the image or bring it to another app but there are way more things you can do with QR codes than just visiting websites you can put your complete address infos as a vCard into a QR code let me show you how first let's not ask for text this time but just enter a text action select the text action first but leave it empty for now second again at the generic QR code action and third with the last step you can do show results again now all we have to do is to create the vcart in the text action it starts with begin vcart and ends with end v card in the second line you should add the version number which I enter as version double colon 4.0 now you enter all your contact infos an overview of the fields or properties you can use you will find at the Wikipedia article about the vcart protocol which I'll also Link in the description there is an example which you can use and underneath this in the table there are all the properties you can use with examples so let's use the example of Simon pero from the Wikipedia article and add some information as you see the full name is already here using the FN property the name fields including prefixes and suffixes are entered using the N property next line is the birthday property where the U is not given only month and day next the gender and then their work email address so let's add a phone number I can use the example from the website to add a cellular number now if I run this shortcut it will create a QR code which will automatically insert the contact into the address book you could save this as an image and put it on your business card or add it to your signature quite convenient right by the way if you want to create the QR code a bit smaller you can add one action type in resize image and add the action between the generate QR action and the show action by dragging it in between those actions you can then add the size I'll go for 100 here we can use the same shortcut structure for joining a Wi-Fi this makes sense if you want your guests to join a Wi-Fi without them having to enter a password the only thing we need to change from the previous example is the text action the text we need to enter is this one the properties used here are t for transmission you can enter the WPA or WEP or no pass as for SSID this is the name of the network and spaces are allowed here P for password and there is a fourth not used property here which is hidden you can set this to true if your Wi-Fi is hidden and then you can still connect to it since you need to enter the password here it can be viewed by anybody who has the QR code this is a convenience but no security measure so you don't have to disclose your password but it can be just as easily read from the QR code using an app therefore I wouldn't only use this in case of a guest Wi-Fi where I would have no problem for guests to know the password anyway so let me create this for my Wi-Fi and see how it works boom connected by the way this works on all platforms so you can also give this QR code to a person using an Android phone the last example is for those who would use QR codes to automate their apple ecosystem since shortcuts run on all platforms you can also start any shortcut using a QR code the syntax you need for the tax action is this obviously this will only trigger a shortcut if you have it already on your phone or iPad or Mac but it might be useful for you to have this triggered on a specific location where you put up this QR code as a trigger so as you can see the shortcut app is amazing and creating QR codes for all kinds of things is fun and easy I hope you learned something new today if you like this kind of content please hit the like button and subscribe to my channel if you would like to know when my next video comes up and if you are into optimizing your mail workflow you need to know about this one setting in Apple Mail which is off by default and which will drastically improve your productivity using Apple Mail on the iPhone or iPad check it out here so see you next time bye

Channel: Patrick Stoeckmann

Views: 15,592

Keywords: QR, qr iphone, qr ipad, qr code, qr codes, create qr codes for free, do i need an app for qr codes, qr, how to make a qr code, qr code generator tutorial, qr code generator

Id: JGzBtPCImbA

Length: 8min 41sec (521 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023