To continue the theme, there are two useful options to allow other apps to use the barcode data (and avoid them having to implement their own camera control and decoder stuff):

DBUS messages which apps can listen for, after having opened mbarcode somehow.

or

Allow plugins in mbarcode, so that a given app can be displayed in the main mbarcode window.


The first is certainly easy enough to do, and would probably be the preference for apps which do something other than handle the barcode data, but if we're talking about a shopping list app, or something of this type, where the scanning is a big part of the usage of the app, I don't know whether the continual switching would be annoying. I also worry about foreground/background issues, especially if the phone goes off part way through - then the user would have to work out what the outside app is trying to do and switch to mbarcode to capture an image.

Perhaps these aren't big things though?

Plugins have are a bit more complex to implement, but at least they sit in the same application so handling the data should be fast.

Any thoughts?