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.
Posting from my Android mobile
I’ve found an application called wpToGo which allows me to post directly from my phone. This is me testing it out.
wpToGo:
Taken Fri 23rd october
Attached is a photo taken outside my office.
