As for the Barcode iPhone App, it’s interesting, but unfortunately I believe it will be a while before we see useful barcode apps on the iPhone. Unfortunately, the cameras on most phones are fairly low quality, which makes barcode detection difficult. Two dimensional barcodes are easier to decode under these conditions; however, there aren’t a lot of two dimensional barcodes in the real world (at least not in North America and Europe).

The real applications most people want (product price lookup on products, for example) will require one dimensional barcode support. Without that, these developers will have to bootstrap a whole new barcode ecosystem to make their applications worthwhile. Hopefully, I’ll get this to a point where it’s suitable for a phone applications in addition to a web application.

I found an interesting note from Wil Shipley (Delicious Monster) on the approach to handle fixed-focus lenses: “It’s a totally different approach, and it can actually de-blur a blurry barcode using some techniques from astronomy.”

And off I go to do some research!

I noticed, BTW, that the default QuickTime video capture settings dialog for the external iSight allows for setting the focus manually, so focus setting could also be done programatically with the SGSetChannelSettings API, which is interesting because a) it’s not FireWire-dependent like the VDIIDC stuff, and b) it could be called from QuickTime for Java, which in turn could live in a signed applet. I should see if I can get to a MacBook and bring up its video capture settings dialog (or is the MacBook fixed focus too?). Of course, I guess none of this is currently accessible from Flash, is it?

I’m not aware of any way that Flash exposes to manipulate focus (see the Camera class). Even worse, the new breed of built-in webcams that are appearing on new laptops have their focal point fixed to the position where your face is usually located when it’s in front of the laptop (for conferencing), so even if there were a Flash-accessible API, it wouldn’t help in this case.

I can’t speak to whether Delicious Library works on the MacBook’s and iMac’s built-in iSight (which are USB devices), but on my old FireWire iSight, it’s very obvious they programatically reset the focus to just a few inches away, as you can hear the servo spin inside the camera and see yourself unfocused in the preview window. I suppose this is accomplished by means of low-level camera-access calls like VDIIDCGetFeatures. Maybe there’s an equivalent QuickTime call for USB at this point, or maybe it’s done directly through USB device calls. At any rate, it seems like Flash would need to expose some sort of a camera settings API to let you programatically set focus, right?

–Chris

http://www.qode.com

Gavitec has a platform to read the symbologies from your cell phone or mobile device.

Oh yeah, Active shopper has a mobile application to scan or enter a product code and go to the web to find the cheapest price with your mobile device.

Nice article. Very telling of things to come.