[00:00:09.560] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.850] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.190] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.010] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from the Creative Tinker.
[00:00:14.020] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back to this episode 127.
[00:00:27.770] - Taylor
That's quite a lot.
[00:00:29.060] - Gordon
I'll be honest, I didn't expect to get into triple figures. I was dubious we were going to get into double figures, to be honest. But yeah here we are, 127. We are over a quarter of the way to the next hundred.
[00:00:43.430] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:43.890] - Gordon
It's amazing. So welcome back to those who've been with us before, and welcome to those who've never been with us before. And we have a couple of interesting topics to talk about today. First of all, any news?
[00:00:58.170] - Taylor
No, none from me.
[00:00:59.290] - Gordon
Okay, no news from me either. Let's get straight into it. Would you like to start?
[00:01:04.040] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:04.930] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:01:05.640] - Taylor
So a while ago when I was using Spotify, I created an integration on my website which essentially showed what I was currently listening to and it pulled live data from Spotify through Last FM which basically made it easier to be able to poll for data for the current song. I would show it on my website and then if I wasn't playing anything, it would say, 'not listening to anything.' And this would update. If I changed the song and you were still on my website, it would actually update in real time, which is quite nice. And I've been doing some mentoring recently and one of the features that they wanted to do on personalized mentoring is they wanted to add Spotify integration. So the client had a car type website and we're thinking that we can add this Spotify "currently playing in the office." The idea of the mentoring is to show him how to go about certain solutions in a more developer focused way. He's a really good designer. He's Pedro, who I built Oxi Change Log with, and I've done lots of cool projects with him. We were creating a Spotify integration, and I'd already created this on my personal site, so it was just a matter of pulling out the bits that I needed, but obviously adapting it to work the way that they wanted, or he wanted, sorry. Because his setup is slightly different to how I had it and mine was in a block form, so it was reusable; so there's things there that weren't needed and things like that. We had a good time breaking it down, working through it, why certain things were there. Hit a few snags, but we got them fixed. And yeah, he signed up for a Last FM or connected the Spotify account to Last FM. And yeah, now if you visit their website, although it's currently still being built, but if you were to visit their website, it would show if they were listening to something on Spotify. And if not, it would say 'not listening to anything.'
[00:03:22.150] - Gordon
So that's really interesting because you don't use Spotify currently, do you?
[00:03:26.360] - Taylor
No. So I switched to Apple Music. So yeah, my Spotify integration is just on my site, but I don't use it because Apple don't have any API like that that you can easily pull from without draining your battery, essentially. And I already drain my battery enough with my other automations.
[00:03:48.020] - Gordon
And the fact that you're running the beta software currently with iOS 17. So that's testing software. So that could very easily be draining your battery as well.
[00:03:59.550] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:03:59.930] - Gordon
Look how much taller I am than you today. Oh, okay. You're not wearing your thing on your neck, are you, to make sure you're standing up properly?
[00:04:09.440] - Taylor
No.
[00:04:09.880] - Gordon
That's what it is. Okay, so the Spotify integration is all done and it's working?
[00:04:15.030] - Taylor
Yeah, it was working well. The only thing was it wasn't updating live if you changed the song. And I'm not sure why that was. So next session, we're going to look into that and see if we can fix it. And we also fixed some of the Fluent Form issues. They recently released a massive 5.0 update, which came with a lot of new things, new UI, new features, a REST API. One of the things that they did is they deprecated a lot of the hooks, the filter hooks, which they would still work, but you basically would get a warning to say, "Please use the new hooks." Essentially, they're all the same, apart from its Fluent Forms slash your hook name, rather than Fluent Form underscore your hook name. So we fixed that as well, which was good.
[00:05:06.140] - Gordon
And Fluent Forms has had several minor updates since with little bugs that come out when you have a major version. So I think it's 5.0:3 is the latest. So 5.0:1, 5.0:2, 5.0:3, which means that I've been doing an awful lot of updating on an awful lot of sites. And in fact, I had an issue with one of my forms where a button that we'd specified to be a certain size in a column, the column size was a certain size, so that the text was on one line, changed and broke. And it changed it to a smaller size. So it was on two lines, which wasn't great. And there may be other issues that I haven't found yet. But one of these things when you do have an update that come out like this is to go and test the functionality of that plug-in just to make sure that it's working as expected because the last thing you want, especially with a form plug-in, is for it not to be sending forms to you. So it's a really good idea to get them tested.
[00:06:10.410] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely.
[00:06:12.080] - Gordon
Anything else you have to say on your subject?
[00:06:14.400] - Taylor
No, I don't think so. Just having fun with APIs and reusing codes that I'd written two years ago now and refactoring it as I went because there's always ways you can refactor it, write it better, things like that.
[00:06:29.060] - Gordon
Well, that's right. New ways of doing things, new APIs, new knowledge, lots of different reasons to refactor code. So I'd like to talk about V1CE cards. Now, it's spelt V1CE, so it's not as you would expect it to be. But these cards are rather nifty. They're rather clever. So they're like credit cards. So you can get them in different materials. We'll come back to that. But we've chosen, or I've chosen, and you're getting for your birthday, a plastic one. Now, the plastic card looks just like a credit card. Same thickness as far as I understand. It hasn't arrived yet. But you can have it printed on one side with whatever design you want. That could be your name, it could be your logo, it could be anything you like, really. And depending on the material that you use will depend on how it gets printed. And on the other side is a QR code. So let me go through the functionality of it first, and then we'll go back to the materials and things that you can choose. So it, first of all, has a QR code on it so that anybody can scan the QR code. Come back to what that does in a second. The second functionality is an NFC chip inside it. So you can tap on a device that has NFC, like a mobile phone, for example, and it will do your recommended action. Now, there is an app that goes with these cards and what you can do is you can set up different profiles. Now, a profile could be a packet of information. So it could be a website address, simple as that. It could be a contact card which has your name, your address, your telephone numbers, your social media, etc. All of that in one go. It could be that it's a deep link. So for example, if you've got a Facebook page, it could be a link that will load when they scan the QR code or they get the tap, it will take them into the Facebook app and take them to your Facebook page, but in the app rather than as a URL. And there are lots of other different things you can have. So you could have a lead capture, where you can have a form that is submitted on their phone, on the person who's being tapped on's phone, and they just fill it in. And then that sends all the information back to you so that you can then add them as a contact or a lead. And it's a really interesting way of doing things because you can change the profile that you're sending on that QR code or the NFC chip every single time it gets used. So if you've got more than one business, as I do, I can set up multiple profiles. And if I turn up and see someone and want to give them my details, I just choose the one that I want on my phone, and then I can use the card just tap, and all the correct information will go to that person. And I can just change it as many times as I like. Now, I don't know if there's a limit to the number of profiles you can have. I'm pretty sure there is, but I don't know what that is. There is no limit to the number of taps that you can have, or scans of your QR code, once you have the actual card. And it's a really clever software. It's basically the software that's doing all the work because that QR code is sending them different information every time that they scan it, depending on what you want them to receive. But it's a really nice solution to save having to give out business cards or having business cards on you all the time.
[00:10:29.010] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:10:29.430] - Gordon
And if you don't have your business card on you or your V1CE card, you can also, I believe, add it to your Apple Wallet so that you've got the QR code there that you can then allow people to just scan from your phone directly. And I think you can do the QR code from within the app as well. So you don't have to have that card with you, which is really cool. Now, the price of these depends on the material that you use. So the one that we've gone for is the plastic one. I thought it would be the most durable, and that works out at 40 pounds for the card. And you can send them a full colour CMYK print so that they'll print one side of it completely. In fact, your one is edge to edge print.
[00:11:22.020] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:11:22.400] - Gordon
So it's completely covered and it looks just like your business card, which is great. I've just got my logo on it. You can choose different colour bases for the plastic ones. You're going to have a blue or a yellow. In our case, we got white and silver. So that's the first. You can have matt and gloss as well. I think we both went for gloss.
[00:11:42.200] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:11:42.360] - Gordon
So it gives a better print. The other materials that they have are bamboo, which is an unusual one. So bamboo is actually the wood bamboo, and it absorbs the ink more. So you can print on it with the grain showing. The problem with bamboo, in my opinion, is it's susceptible to water and it can warp and so on. So I didn't particularly want that. Even though bamboo is sustainable and I can understand why people would want to use that. The next step up from that is metal. And you can choose a couple of different types of metal. And instead of it printing on the metal, it etches out of the metal. So it's like one, it's like a duotone? Yeah, so you've got a tint, effectively, because it's gouging out part of the metal to give a different colour, effectively. So that's the way you do that. And then they're top... I think that's about £100. And then their top card is 24 carat gold.
[00:12:56.290] - Taylor
You didn't get that one for me?
[00:12:57.380] - Gordon
No, I didn't. Why would you want a 24 carat gold card? I'd be worried about taking it out with me. 24 carat gold card. And again, that's etched. So I'm guessing laser etched. So it's taking the material away. So you've got the two tone for that as well. And that I think was £300, something like that. But we've ordered them. We've sent them our artwork. Quite often the designers will just receive a logo and they will then do whatever you want. You tell them where you want the logo to go and they'll do it, send you a proof. Because we sent full artwork, they sent us the proof and we checked it earlier this week. And it should take 2-3 days to print and get to us.
[00:13:49.110] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:13:49.640] - Gordon
So when they arrive, we'll tell you what we think. I think it's quite an interesting concept. We'll put a link in the show notes. If they do affiliate links, we'll have an affiliate link there. If not, it'll just be a regular link. If it is an affiliate link, it means that there's something that we get from it for recommending them. Now, I can't recommend them fully because I haven't actually received the product yet. But so far, everything is good. I like the process. I like the app. We've got to play with the app. And linking the app to your account is really easy. You just have the app on your phone which is already logged in. You take the card that arrives in the post, you tap it on your phone, and you're then linked, which is really quick and easy, I think.
[00:14:38.650] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:14:39.030] - Gordon
But I like the idea of having one business card that you have with you that you can then give to multiple people multiple times. Now, you've actually got something coming from Kickstarter that is similar to this, isn't it?
[00:14:54.530] - Taylor
Yes. So I backed the AirCard, which a while ago I spoke about the Edge Pros, which I backed by Rolling Square, I believe. They're a Swedish company, I believe. And they've Kickstarted quite a lot of products. I've backed three products of theirs now. They have come up with something called an AirCard. And what it is is it uses the same technology that your air tags use and it allows you to use it as a 'find my...' AirCard. So you can put this in your wallet so you can then find the AirCard. You can track it on the same app that you would use for your phone, for your devices, for your air tags, and you're also able to see your wallet. Which because it's slightly different in terms of a wallet is normally flat, it basically acts like another card, which is quite nice.
[00:15:54.220] - Gordon
An air tag would be difficult to put in a wallet because it's bulbous, isn't it? So it's not flat like a card is, whereas this is. Like a credit card.
[00:16:04.580] - Taylor
And then they've also added the ability to have a link, NFC type thing that you can do. Similar thing to what the V1CE card can do, but not as complex because that's not the main feature of it. The main feature is the find my.
[00:16:20.030] - Gordon
Yeah. And so what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to put them both together because this is actually a Father's Day present to me.
[00:16:25.640] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:16:26.040] - Gordon
The Aircard, which is really nice. We give each other tech that we think we'd enjoy and they'd enjoy for birthdays and presents and things, which is quite nice. So I think what I'm going to do is, because I've got an RFID wallet coming, which is going to be able to hold a certain number of cards. So I think what I might do is put my AirCard and my V1CE card into it, so that I'll be able to find my V1CE card when I can't find it and the AirCard will be allowing me to find it. And then I've also got pretty much everything I need to be able to tap onto different people and let them have my details. So yeah, that's not due until September, I think. Something around there. August time maybe, around that time. So when that arrives, we'll tell you about that as well. So that's everything from me. We'll put links for these things in the show notes.
[00:17:20.710] - Taylor
That's everything from me as well.
[00:17:22.190] - Gordon
Thank you for joining us. As always, you can like, share, and subscribe. Our videos can be found on YouTube and on Facebook.
[00:17:30.250] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:17:35.430] - Gordon
And of course, subscribe on your favourite podcast app so that you can just listen to us in the car. Until next week, 1pm on Friday. We'll see you then. My name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:17:49.550] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:17:52.020] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:17:52.720] - Taylor
Bye.
