QR codes revisited

I had a brief flirtation with QR codes (what?) in 2004, but it petered out somewhere along the way. I stumbled across QR codes again recently and thought I'd see what the current state of things was. After all, we now all have smartphones with significant processing power, a permanent net connection, and crappy little cameras.

Google quickly lead me to ZXing (pronounced "zebra crossing"), and I quote:

open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library implemented in Java. Our focus is on using the built-in camera on mobile phones to photograph and decode barcodes on the device, without communicating with a server. We currently have production-quality support for:

• UPC-A and UPC-E
• EAN-8 and EAN-13
• Code 39
• Code 128
• QR Code
• ITF

That sounds pretty good. And the supported device list is even better: JavaME, Android, RIM/Blackberry, iPhone, BUG, and a Symbian port (just getting started).

I have a Blackberry 8310. So I go to the download page, no binaries or OTA installers, just a 32 Mb archive. Mmmh. Okay, no problem, I compile from source all the time. Grab the archive, open the README.

"you will need to have Apache's Ant tool installed to run this"

Okay, no problem. I have a linux dev box with that installed. From the command line given I also glean I will need a JDK which I don't have installed, so I grab and install that. Read on, and saw I needed Sun's Java Wireless Toolkit. Okay, installed that too. Hey, I need some files from the Blackberry JDK. Okay, grabbed that... eventually (way to make downloads not easy and not cross-platform, RIM) and extracted the .jar files I needed. Tried to compile, it says I need something called "proguard". Googled it, grabbed and installed. Compiled again. Warnings, no errors. Ended up with a .jar file, which I had to convert to a .cod file using arcane instructions, but to no avail. I think this is because I compiled on a linux box and the blackberry JDK is a windows box.

At this point I said "sod it". I hope the iPhone version is easier to install, but from the getting started guide I get a definite "fiddle with it" feeling. Which is okay, I'll try compiling it from scratch tomorrow but since I wanted to play with QR codes (as in RIGHT NOW) I grabbed a copy of BeeTagg - another free app which can read QR codes (and maybe others? I'm not sure) and which has binaries for a ton of phones and mobile operating systems, most supplied via OTA install. Like it should be. And it works, it feels a little slow (but that might be the blackberry) but snap a picture of a QR code and it offers basic decoding and actions - output the decoded text, open the URL, initiate a phone call.

You can encode to QR using online tools like this one which nice because you can fiddle with the ECC settings or this one from ZXing, great because you can encode contact cards, email, geolocation, URL, and more. I'm sure there are offline encoding tools as well, haven't really looked yet. This would be pretty sweet for asset management - with a couple of hundred workstations and massive amounts of servers and assorted other hardware this could help you quickly pull up relevant data on your mobile.

Also amusing: an entire novel rendered only in QR, spread out across a city, with text instructions on how to find the next snippet encoded in QR stickers.

UPDATE: one of the ZXings devs commented (aren't the intarwebs awesome?) and added links for J2ME and BB OTA downloads. He also mentioned (as I feared) that Blackberry is a poor barcode-reading platform, and I am inclined to agree as only the latest models/JDK have direct application access to the camera, the older versions must all invoke the camera application and look for a saved image file. That is pretty weak. Oh well. The BeeTagg app does OK for now, and I'm sure we'll eventually upgrade to newer BBs - I think I'll skip the Storm but the new Curve looks nice.