Can anyone point me to a good tutorial or basic starting point for using ZXing to make a useful app?

[Drew Waymire]

Excuse my general ignorance-- I don't have a computer background, but I'm just starting to get into this area and I'm really loving it. I'm interested in teaching myself coding through the development of a useful app for Android (and maybe later iPhone). Unfortunately, my level of starting knowledge is so low that I don't know what I need to learn in the first place, and that's where I'm looking for some help.

I'm a veterinarian, and my idea is this: I'd like to create a simple app where a person can enter what kind of pet they have-- eg, cat, dog, bird, stegosaurus, etc. The app then works with a barcode app API and a UPC SDK, along with a database that I will create, to help people decide what plants are safe to have in the home. The idea is that the user would scan a plant in whatever retail store-- Home Depot, Walmart, Ikea-- and if the plant is in the database, the app will assign a color code and give some information about the safety of this plant for the pets in the house-- red meaning potential life-threatening or permanent toxicity, yellow for vomiting/diarrhea/skin reaction, and green for no known toxicity.

I guess I was hoping that there would be some simple API that would allow me to work with a barcode app, but I'm having a hard time finding this. Just in case I am so clueless that everyone is confused about what I"m asking, let me describe another experience I had that I'm hoping to emulate. I have used the Google Docs API to work with Google Docs Spreadsheet to create some very interactive documents shared between friends that track certain things we are interested in, convert text to images, keep running totals, etc. It was very simple-- I just had to learn some basic Javascript-like scripting, learn about regular expressions, and google around for tricky parts. THe process was simple-- create a new spreadsheet, click on a menu item, and then just start writing script, referencing the documentation online. The script would run on the page when an event triggered something or when the page was loaded.

So here, I'm hoping to create an app that calls on some already-written barcode scanning software to pass a result to my simple program, which just grabs the relevant info (plant name, common or scientific) and compares it to a database. After that, I'm happy to learn the rest myself-- how to create a nice interface for the client and display the results, etc.

SO, can you help me with any of the following?

1) Explain why my desired approach is misguided, potentially by giving me some things to research

2) Show me to some documentation for barcode APIs and recommend a barcode program that might work in this way

3) Help me in some other way that I don't even know I need!

[Sean Owen]

It sounds fine. There are two pieces to the app you want to build: 1) scanning the barcode, and 2) everything else. I can only help with 1), but, that part takes about 15 minutes to add. See https://code.google.com/p/zxing/wiki/ScanningViaIntent  This is all you need to know.