What are people using barcode services for?

[srowen]

I am curious to know who out there is using this library or something
similar as the basis for a barcode-related services or project? that
is, not just downloading and building the stock reader but employing
this for some other purpose.

If you can mention what you're up to, and requirements or needs you
have, that would be quite interesting to help steer next features.

[Andreas Jellinghaus]

I would love to use it unchanged - create an Intent asking
for a scanned barcode with the camera - get the result,
and focus on what I want to do with the barcode result.

But as long as there are no android devices available, I need
a workaround. The example in the wiki (placling barcode.jpg in /tmp/)
didn't work for me. I wonder how it is supposed to work - nothing
in the code references "barcode.jpg". Is the Camera object itself
loading that jpeg file?

So right now I integrate the zxing code into my app, and call the
reader to decode the image myself. Long term I would like to simply
modify Barcode.app to work either local or remote using a webcam,
but not sure how to do that so far. If zxing could provide a
version of barcode with the same interface, but using a webcam
instead, that would be great for developing applications while
we all wait for real android devices! (and with no announcements
so far for the rest of the world, that could be another year ...)

Regards, Andreas

[srowen]

Yeah that info is outdated, applied to an old version of the code. I
will remove it. Soon enough there will be real devices. In the
meantime you can shim Tom's code back in, to hook up the emulator to a
real camera feed.

I thought I read that devices would be available in the UK in November
but not sure about that.

[Andrea Bernardi]

Hi, we are using this library for home media (book, CD, DVD)
cataloguing in the context of a digital home.
So, in this use case ZXing is used mainly for decode 1D barcode.

Best Regards,
Andrea Bernardi

2008/10/9 srowen <sro...@gmail.com>:

[Alexander Lucas]

I'm working on a small Netflix Queue app- I want to add support for
scanning barcodes, and having the app use the UPC to look up the movie
and add it to your queue. Most of my requirements are outside the
scope of the Zxing project, but it would be nice to have some lookup
libraries available (for instance, a method I could use that looks up
the UPC code in the upcdatabase, or return a top result on
amazon.com). This would probably fall under the category of an
auxiliary library, as there's no reason to package this in core. But
it's reasonable to assume that most people who are scanning barcodes
with zxing are looking something up, and a few helper classes (beyond
launching a browser using a upc-ified url) would probably go a long
way:D

[dswi...@gmail.com]

Great idea on the Netflix app.

I agree it would be nice to have a library to look up various barcode
contents in the future. I doubt it could be J2ME compliant, but we do
allow Java 1.5 in the client.result package. We'd probably need to
pull in JSON and XML parsing to do it. I don't think it will happen
soon, but overall it's a good idea.

Daniel