Barcodes and Android
Barcodes are very widely used and often contain a unique ID to identify a product, person or similar. They can also be used to store small pieces of information. This is very useful when it comes to Android.
There are a lot of different encodings for barcodes but the one we’re primarily interested in is known as QR Code. It’s a 2-D barcode which looks something like this:
Why are barcodes useful?
They provide us with a quick and easy way to transfer snippets of information (or instructions) to your Android phone.
There is a Google application in the Marketplace called Barcode Scanner. It uses the camera on your phone to act as a barcode reader. It supports a large number of formats.
There are other applications which allow you to display certain information from your phone as a QR Code barcode.
This allows you to display Contact, SMS, URL, Address, Geo Location, and other types of data on your screen in a machine-readable format.
From there, it’s simple to read them on a second device using the barcode scanner.
There are a number of actions on the pone which can be triggered using specially formatted URLs. The most useful of these (for me) is to locate applications in the Marketplace. For example:
market://search?q=pname:com.javielinux.apptoqr
When scanned with an Android phone will search the Marktplace for an application which which generates barcodes for every application on your phone.
I use a number of QR Codes in this blog – Each page has the current url in a QR Code. I also provide the market:// urls for any applications I mention
How can you use QR Codes?
The simplest answer it to take advantage of the Google ZXing (pronounced “Zebra Crossing”). Google has provided online tools to encode data as a QR Code and extract and decode QR codes from images.
If you have a Wordpress blog, you can get a plugin to easily insert QR codes into your posts.
