Notices

I thought it could be a good idea to announce that a new and fresh version of mBarcode (0.1) recently was released into extras-devel for testing. mBarcode has now been ported to Qt and a plugin framework has been modelled.

Warning: Before you try to figure out how to enable the extras-devel repository, please make sure that you understand that this repository contains unstable applications (mbarcode included) which might break your device. Maemo upgrades might also fail when you have installed applications from extras-devel.

That being said, there are currently two working core plugins for the application:
qrcode: Takes any QR code and lets the user do things with it depending on the data type. If its an URL it can be opened in a browser, if it is a vCard it shall in time be possible to make a call or add the person to the address book.
Informed Individual: This is a pre-alpha implementation of the Informed Individual project which I'm working on (the website is old and not updated, but that will be dealt with later). It is in very early development, but I would like to get some input on it as early as possible. The purpose of Informed Individual is to make it easier to make choices based on who and what you trust. It should enable anyone to give an opinion about anything (for now we'll focus on 1D barcodes) and get an opinion weighted by who you trust. The server the plugin uses is not stable (nor secure!) so please be patient with it and know that it might go down every now and then.

To use the plugin, try to scan some barcodes you've got in hands reach and click "Give opinion with Informed Indvidual". Click "Open browser", then "Register" and register yourself a new user. Then you might have to click "Open browser" again in the application and log in afterwards. When prompted, check "Authenticate" and click next. Then you should see a code. Copy this and paste it into the application. Then click "Verify" and go back. Click "Give opinion..." again. Now, give it a score with the slider and write a comment. Hit submit and click "Get opinion..." to see your (and others') opinion in the results.

There will be some changes to this flow in the future Just ask if you want to know more about Informed Individual and the plugin.

Credits for the core functionality of the application goes to lardman (and others). I have mostly been working on the Qt port and plugin framework.

If you dare to use the extras-devel repository and install mBarcode we would really like to get your input about the application and what kind of features you would like. Maybe we or some other plugin developers would like to help you out

Been using it for a day or so now, i love the new tweaks man!
This is going the right way!

Great program!

Is it possible to have a plugin that queries a website with the results? Google, Froogle, or the various UPC databases would be good candidates.

Yep. There have been some other requests for that too. I'll see if I can get around and create such a plugin. If you know about any good UPC databases, we would love to hear about them

This would be a great feature! I noticed android has this (but thats obvious due to google and stuff) but i figured it would come with time, am I right?

I've just added a plugin which lets you look up any result on Google. It will be expanded with more search engines later.

It should show up in extras-devel within a couple of minutes. Just search for mbarcode and install mbarcode-plugin-webrequest. It will be included by default in the next version of mbarcode.

How do you suggest the user should select the search engine? Should it be a button saying "Look up with search engine" which opens a dialog where one could select Google, Amazon etc.?

The websites I know of:

www.google.com : Can often find out quite a bit about a product.

www.checkupc.com : Great claims, but never successful in finding something. I believe it's volunteer based. They claim 6 Million codes in the database.

www.froogle.com, www.amazon.com : good for shopping/price comparison

www.upcdatabase.com : very comprehensive, but not that much info.

www.upcfoodsearch.com : For food products. Not very comprehensive, but it will usually find the manufacturer..

http://upcdata.info : Interesting site..

I think the main ones to me are www.google.com, www.upcdatabase.com, and www.froogle.com


The scan app from Android uses the following:

"What is the backend?

Because scraping store APIs can be bandwidth expensive, the actual searching is handled by a separate server written in Python. The Android phone feeds the scanned UPC/ISBN code and a current zipcode to the server, which then feeds back a very condensed XML response with the essential data. Here's a list of the specific sites/APIs that we scrape:

* UPC Database
* Amazon.com API
* Half.com API
* Yahoo API
* Barnes and Noble (items and store locations)
* Hastings (items and store locations)
* Local libraries (San Francisco, San Jose, Portland)

The Python script will mark any nearby stores or libraries with an address and phone number. For metadata, the script fills in details from any available data source, which means it can still provide answers even if one or more APIs fail. "

From: http://scan.jsharkey.org/

I don't know if the author would be willing to share the Python back end or whether is is already open source.

Wow, you made a plugin in the time it took me to write my reply!! That's pretty quick.

I think your idea of having a button would work great.

BTW, for books, books.google.com works well, but anobii.com seems to have some books that are not on books.google.com

I did a quick test to search a SKU for a water bottle and it searched google.no. Any way to change that to google.com?