What is better now

Reordering is dragging

42Kites ordered blocks with an integer field: new blocks were numbered a hundred apart, and moving one meant typing a number between its two neighbours. It was a defensible design and it is gone. Drag the handle, or use Move up and Move down, or move a block with the keyboard.

There are far more blocks

The old module grid had seventeen tiles. Here is the current library, from the same list the Add Block picker reads, so it cannot drift out of date. Filter it by what you are trying to do, or by what your plan includes.

A tap can finish something

An Action does one thing and does it in one tap: hand over the Wi-Fi password, open directions in the visitor's own maps app, start a call, add an event to their calendar, take a payment, capture a lead, collect a signed waiver, send a request to your staff. On 42Kites most of these were a Button block pointed at somebody else's website.

The page can remember who is reading it

Ask a visitor something once and the answer is available everywhere else in your space. It can be used in the wording, it can decide which blocks appear, and it shows up in your numbers.

You can see what happened

This is the largest single gap the old product had. 42Kites counted nothing and had no page to show you if it had. NearField counts views, taps and scans, tells taps and scans apart, attributes them to the individual Marker, and keeps a timeline of every answer a visitor has given.

• Stats shows reach: how many people, through which Markers, on which days.
• Audience shows knowledge: who they are, what they answered, who came back.
• A shareable report link lets you send the numbers to a board or a sponsor without giving them an account.
• Every answer can be exported as a CSV, emailed to you.

You design and order the cards yourself

A custom overlay used to mean sending artwork to us and waiting. Marker Studio does it in the browser: pick a background, add a headline and an icon or your own logo, choose whether a QR is printed on the face and where it sits, then order. There is a catalogue of ready-made designs if you would rather start from one.

Money goes to you, directly

The old advice was to generate a payment link elsewhere and paste it into a button. NearField has Donate and Pay blocks that run on your own connected Stripe account. The visitor never leaves the flow, the money settles into your account rather than ours, and refunds and disputes stay between you and your customer.

There is an app for the people running it

Not for visitors. They still need nothing. The NearField Builder app for iPhone and iPad lets you hold your phone against a Marker to see what it opens and point it somewhere else on the spot, sends a push when a visitor answers a block you asked to be notified about, and can be locked behind Face ID.

Multiple properties without a ticket

Splitting devices between a zoo, an airport and a college used to mean asking us to build sub-accounts by hand. Projects do it yourself: group Experiences by place, and answers, audience tallies and analytics roll up per property.

Two things stayed exactly as good

• The Inclusion Bar. Same position, same three controls, still on every plan including free. Translation covers 20 languages, one of which is English, and read-aloud offers four voices.
• Re-pointing a card without reprinting it. Unchanged, because it was right the first time.