Fun with 2D Barcodes on Your Phone

Have you noticed those fantastic black and white grids - same demented crosswords - sound up around the place? In newspapers, flyers and the like? No? Well, I have. And I move say if I lived in Nihon I'd hit seen them on T-shirts, drink mugs and a whole aggregation more.They're 2D barcodes for your ambulatory device (primarily phones). You verify a picture with the built-in camera and the onboard cipher automatically extracts some text, a sound number or a link. (If your sound is a taste older, you crapper download the cipher from your manufacturer.)I've been activity around with these ambulatory codes (QR codes and Datamatrix) for the time some weeks, intellection of things to do with them. As a play point, Nokia's accessible webservice for creating the images needed to foregather our friends at Yahoo Pipes.The termination is Mbarcode URL. It's separate along the aforementioned lines as Embiggen TinyURL: there's a tender where you crapper see it working, plus a bookmarklet for browsers and a fix for publishers.Go on, give it a click! (Click anywhere on the popup to near it.)One of the limitations with the QR and Datamatrix codes is there's a bounds to how such you crapper arrange in. As it gets bigger, the blocks intend smaller and the decoding nonachievement evaluate grows. This limits the trenchant filler of a come to around 50 characters - modify inferior if you want to be robust.So behind the scenes, Mbarcode uses TinyURL to shorten the direct unification into something such more compact. Now you don't hit to vexation most the size. As a result, you crapper use the data: URI plot to arrange as such into your ambulatory codes as you want. I've "compressed" a 10K PNG image into a QR cipher using this approach, effectively achieving farther higher partitioning than you deserve with a ambulatory sound camera. Neat.What's the point? Not sure, really. Here's a pair of ideas:

• You're feeding along on your concealment and you want to beam a unification to your sound for when you're discover and most later. Click the bookmarklet, saucer your sound at the screen, verify a snap. Done. It's in your phone.
• You're discover with a modify someone who owns an iPhone with GPS. She's checking discover nearby exerciser on Google Maps. You'd same to countenance too, but patch your sound has a scheme connection, it has no GPS. What are you feat to do? Laboriously type the come or longitude/latitude into Google Maps? No! You're someone clicks the bookmarklet, it creates the QR code, you behave her concealment with your sound and now you're both feeding the current location!

Yeah, it's not a lot, but it's still fun to play. Maybe more uses module come later, especially if I amount discover what to do with the modify experimental online barcode intellect at ZXing.Suggestions?Filed in: webtech, hacks, tinyURL, bookmarklets