Re: mbarcode
 

I just did some quick benchmarks of mbarcode versus a pure Qt app with only one button. The approximate results for boot times are as follows:

pure qt app: 1.9 s
mbarcode (lens cover closed): 5.4 s
mbarcode (lens cover open): 9.2 s

There's nothing scientific here, just me starting the application from terminal and running a stopwatch a couple of times. The numbers are an approximate mean value.

In other words. It takes almost ten seconds to start scanning, and over 5 seconds before the user sees any activity. This should be lowered significantly. I'm going to look for some possible enhancements now.

Re: mbarcode
 

I did some testing and benchmarking now, and I found that most functions that we are running now are needed. I found a few enhancements, but these only shortened the boot time by 0.1 seconds. We could lower the boot time by ~0.5 seconds by removing the video cropping, but I think the video cropping is very useful, so I don't want to change that.

I might have a look at this again later, but at the moment I don't see many hacks we can apply to make it load faster. It is gstreamer that loads a bit slowly and causes most of the delays.

Re: mbarcode
 

One thing that I would suggest is to avoid doing all the loading until the main window is visible. You could have a visible progress animation as you go through the loading. Getting something on screen as quickly as possible would be helpful, I think.

Re: mbarcode
 

That is a good idea. I'll try to do that now ;)

Re: mbarcode
 

I figured the easiest and most thread-safe way to do this is to add a splash screen. I've commited a version with a QSplashScreen now.

Re: mbarcode
 

Well... I have got mbarcode 0.2.1-1. It works well, but I would suggest some changes.

First, why fps are changing when lens cover is closed? What kind of superfluous activity is going on when the camera is closed?

Second, could you give some delay time for the user before the scan itself so that he could understand what does the camera see? It's not necessary; but in the beginning of the scan I can hardly understand what the camera sees.

Third, does the mbarcode know what type of code it scanned? Can it say it: the barcode scanned was EAN (just an example), first three digits show that the country is ..., etc? It could be an addition for mbarcode; for instance, XML files could be used for storing information about meanings of different values of the bar-codes.

Fourth. Does mbarcode try to connect to Internet to get more information about the barcode? If yes, could it be separated into an optional extension: some people would prefer not to use it?

And, of course, performance is as important for me as it is for you. But right now the application doesn't seem to be slow.

Re: mbarcode
 

There is almost no activity and that is why the OpenGL repaints are lowered to a minimum. Otherwise the application will cause everything else to run slowly. For instance when you switch to the task manager. The repaints could probably be stopped completely, but leaving it at 2 fps makes sure that any changes are still drawn on screen.

I'm not quite sure what you are thinking of here. If you experience a bright white picture this is because you are aiming your camera towards something dark and close up. In well lit conditions the camera shows a picture perfectly fine on my device.

Yes, mbarcode knows some things about the barcode, such as the type, but it does not have any info about countries and such. That would be a nice addition. Maybe something useful for a plugin which could be integrated into the main application at some point?

It does not access the internet unless an plugin (extension) requests this. Plugins usually don't do this before the user has clicked the plugin's button. Some plugins might do so in the future, but I guess most plugins will let the user enable/disable this in a settings screen.

Glad to hear that. It performs reasonably fast for me as well, except for the boot time.

Re: mbarcode
 

Hi again, I saw that there was a new build for mbarcode, but it's not in repos yet. (I suppose it will be soon) I didn't see anything about the data matrix codes in the changelog though. Is the bugfix from joshn53 in the update? It would be nice to have that back ;) , Otherwise, is it coming soon?

//Habmala

Re: mbarcode
 

when will the first build arrive that supports looking up barcodes on the internet? :O

Re: mbarcode
 

The data matrix bugfix should be in the latest build. Just report back here if it still doesn't work.

Looking up barcodes on the Internet is possible now through the web browser (Amazon, Google, etx.) with the web lookup plugin. There currently are no plugins for looking up products that are integrated into the application GUI.