Just to move the discussion from the various threads into a central one for further discussion.

For the previous threads see here: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...=11032&page=74 post #734 onwards.

And here: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...hlight=barcode

And here: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...hlight=barcode

Probably others, if so, please list them. Anyway, it appears that there are a number of nice opensource libraries/pieces of code to do decoding, so hopefully it should be possible to get something up and running without having to do all the interesting image processing ourselves (though I'm sure all these libs will need tweaking/patches, so don't worry those of you like me who like that sort of thing )

Anyway, these look like likely suspects for our decoder codes:

http://www.geocities.com/ooosawaddee3pdf417/
Does:
pdf417 barcodes

http://zebra.sourceforge.net/
Does:
EAN-13/UPC-A
EAN-8
Code 128
Code 39
Interleaved 2 of 5

http://www.libdmtx.org/ and http://oss.devit.com/datamatrix/
Does:
Data Matrix barcodes

So, that's a reasonable selection of barcode decoders that it should be possible to plumb into an app.

Camera info here: http://maemo.org/development/documen..._api_bora.html

So, what should this application be able to do? Your thoughts?

I was thinking that pointing it at a bar code, it should tell us what type the barcode is (this may need some tweaking, as most of the mentioned libs just decode one type, so we'd need to either manually select in the first instance (just to get it up and running) or have the software decide (the ideal solution)). It should then tell us what the barcode has encoded in it (be it an URL, ISBN number, Universal Product Code (UPC).

Then once we have this info, I suppose it should do something with it: Allow us to send the URLs to the browser to open, list which manufacturer code is in the UPC (this data is available afaik, but what product is up to the manufacturer, so this may be more tricky), or what the title of the book is from the ISBN (this service is available on the web).

So, what do people think, worth a try? Anyone fancy helping out?

Cheers,

Simon