Gadgetory

hey everybody Joe from pocketnow.com today I've got a question for you do you remember way back in the day of the early Windows Mobile's and even the palm devices they had an IR port or an infrared port was really neat you could squirt that's their term not mine you could send information from one device over to another device like business cards documents to-do lists calendar appointments all kinds of stuff but then the IR ports kind of went away Bluetooth became vogue but you really didn't have the same sharing abilities with Bluetooth that we were really promised when Bluetooth was first being talked about so today I'd like to show you the next best thing or maybe even better on your Android it's sharing information using QR codes let's go look okay so first of all what are QR codes well QR is an acronym it stands for quick response but generally they're just two-dimensional barcodes that contain information textual based information and then through various different barcode scanners that textual information can be translated into readable text or understandable text so what I'd like to do is show you a app today called a barcode scanner now this app is by zebra crossing or Zi Xing depending on how you want to pronounce it it's based on a set of libraries that's hosted by Google so let's open it up what you'll see is a little Knight Rider style flashing red bar and before I show you what this does I want to show you what a QR code looks like so right there that's a plaintext barcode in other words it's a two dimensional code data is encoded both that way and that way so that's two dimensions UPC symbols for example are one dimensional code they only contain information horizontally not horizontally and vertically so what plaintext does code contain well let's take a look we're going to see if I can find it my viewfinder and right there says it found plain text the text in this is hello world and now I can do various different things I can do a web search I can share this by email or I can share it by SMS now that's not a feature of the barcode that's a feature of this app but in the barcode itself it says hello world next let's do something a little bit more usable and that would be an SMS code if you want somebody to be able to send you a text message for example like American Idol if you want to send a text to vote for a particular candidate you can encode that text message in a barcode so that people just have to hold their phone up to scan it and there you go it will automatically compose the text address it and send it off on its way so let's see what this one does now this is normally a little bit faster but I have to hold it just right for the camera to be able to pick it up and there you go it found an SMS address in this case the SMS was one two three four five obviously that's not gonna go anywhere useful but you can see how right here I can send an SMS or send an MMS pretty simple let's do something that's a little bit more user friendly for normal people like you and me and that would be a phone number let's say you're a business and you want someone to call you you run a sandwich shop and you want somebody to call in an order no problem you print this barcode on your material you say scan to call and let's go ahead and do that right there immediately found a phone number that phone number happens to be my Google Voice number so anybody who wants to call me I guess they can now now this app will let you not only dial that it'll also let you add it as a contact so that's really nice next let's do something even cooler geolocation what if you've got that sandwich shop but nobody knows where it is well you can gon code your latitude and longitude into a QR code and then just as easy as scanning that phone number we can scan geographic coordinates now from here we can show it on a map and we can even get directions really cool stuff next a URI the universal resource indicator some people call this a URL it's a web address very simple now you'll notice compared to these other codes there's an awful lot more data in this code you can tell that because the dots are a lot smaller that's one good thing about you are codes there's redundancy of data so even if the barcode gets damaged or some of its missing chances are it'll still be recognizable you can have up to 30% redundancy in your code so that's really neat so let's scan and this URL and see what happens right there you can see it's got a URL to my website and this is actually a link to my daughter playing the piano kind of cool it could also be a link to your menu if you're running that sandwich shop but let's say in your sandwich shop you've got a an Android app so you can go ahead and assemble your sandwich virtually and then send in your order so all you got to do is submit it and they'll have your sandwich ready and waiting for you well to do that you might want to advertise your sandwich app that you can get from the Android Market well to do that just make a market app barcode and right there a different URL this time market colon slash slash search question mark Q equals blah blah blah blah blah now what this does is it's a very specific URL that your phone your Android phone understands so you can open your browser and it will read that URL and reader do over to the Android Market and from there you can choose to install the app so again really cool next you've got an email you want to send me an email great imagine putting this on your business card email me here of course an email address is pretty quick pretty simple but when you put it into a code look at that not only do I have my email address but I can also embed a comment now unfortunately the Gmail client doesn't read those comments and pass it on to the email but we're hoping sometime in the future they will you can add this as a contact or send an email right there but that's just touching on the real potential so what I'd like to do is show you over here on this other Android phone this is my contact information on a g1 and I've got that same barcode app installed now from here I can go to menu and I can show barcode now in the Android 2.1 version of this app you do it via share but on this version for 1.6 it's show barcode so we'll do that and right now it's generating a barcode and you can see it's pretty heavy it's got all of my information right there in it so let's go ahead and scan it see if I can get far enough away from it to focus and right there just like that I was able to immediately scan that barcode it found my contact information my name my address my phone number all that stuff I'm gonna now it get away from from here I can add that as a contact show it on a map my address dial the phone number right away or even send an email that's really really cool to be able to go and send your contact information just like that now here's what's cooler and this goes back to the IR port that I hinted at in the introduction before I could share this or squirt it via infrared over to another device but it was usually you know device to device they both had to be Android devices they both had to be Windows devices it didn't work when you were trying to go from palm to Windows Mobile or Pocket PC back then it didn't work well at all and that was because each device handles things a little bit differently specifically that infrared signal well in that infrared signal you could encode all kinds of stuff but unless you had that translation you can do it so people came up with translation apps to be able to send data from one device over to another device here we don't have IR ports anymore they've kind of gone away and believe it or not they're they're making a comeback to be able to control TVs and whatnot but I can take this information from this Nexus One and put it over on this g1 right there or vice versa or if I've got an iPhone I can use a similar type of app and I can still get that the nice thing is all of these QR codes are standards-based and they're coming up with new standards all the time but it's just data the phone interprets what to do with it which is kind of cool so now I can present information it doesn't even have to be on a phone that can be read by a phone that has a camera and let's face it most phones have cameras today so one last thing that I want to show you and let's go ahead and use this I don't know let's use this URL okay now I've just shown you one app that can do this let me come over here and show you the goggles app which does things a little bit differently now I'm gonna come in here and I'm going to prop this just so it recognizes that now you'll notice it's not doing any active scanning at all so if I take a picture it's going to take that picture and now it's going to scan it this takes a little bit more time and it kind of uses a Google search result so you can see it's got the barcode that it just read and then web results which is kind of neat and then other matches similar images and it lets me rate these results well that was perfect so I'm going to go ahead and mark five stars so just like that you can scan using Google Goggles one last thing that I'd like to show you and I don't have a barcode to illustrate this but I do want to show you the app because it does basically the same thing that's Microsoft tag reader and you can kind of see not that app you can kind of see the the way that the barcode looks it's a little bit more basic than a QR code in a QR code the more information you encode the more complex it gets so an email versus a URI for example URI has much more data it's harder to read well with Microsoft tag all of the codes are exactly the same length at least as far as I understand what they do is when you scan that code it goes through it reads it and it sends that off to their web server where it resolves what that code is now that lets you do and this is obviously isn't a Microsoft QR or Microsoft tag code rather but you kind of get the idea it's going to then connect to the internet and figure out what that code means and then come back with the data so the data is not actually in the code the code is just a reference to a place on the web where the data is that lets you get some analytics to know how many times people are actually scanning your code but if they're offline or have poor coverage or worse yet if they don't have the tag reader software on their phone they're not going to be able to resolve that that's really why I like the barcode scanner app again by Zi Xing or zebra crossing it's a free app in the marketplace and it can scan all kinds of codes from one decodes to 2d QR codes and several other that I didn't even talk about so go ahead and give it a shot I'd like to see what kind of QR codes you can come up with in fact if you want to head over to Joe Levi comm you can check out an article that I have basically tells you how to create your own QR codes using the Google charts API so take a look at that and tell me what kind stuff you'd like to know the one thing that I couldn't find and if there's anybody out there who can find it please let me know there's one format that I'd really like to see and that is an iCal format or an event a calendar event I want to be able to scan a code and have all the calendar information the title of it the date and time that it starts the date and time that it ends the geolocation where it is some notes about what it is I'd like to be able to just scan that with my camera put it into my calendar and be done with it but I couldn't find that standard out there so if you know where that is please leave me some comments down in the bottom better yet share with me a QR code that will let me do that so really cool stuff again talking QR codes and the barcode scanner app for Android I am Joe for pocketnow.com