Notices

Now that the N900 will come with a camera on the backside my first question was: Will there be an app that let's me easily scan a QRCode/Barecode?
I noticed a growing number of 2D Barcodes, mostly as replacements for post stamps but also on advertising for the "Bundestagswahl" and sometimes I'm curious to know what they want me to tell.
So is somebody working on an application like that already?
Maybe with pluggable support for multiple types of 2D codes?

You might want to have a look at this thread
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=27508

There is ZXing (zebra-crossing) which I know works on
Android devices
http://code.google.com/p/zxing/

There are ports for other platforms. I assume it could probably
be used as a starting point for building such an application.

There seems to be some open source libraries around.
In Ubuntu, there are the libdecodeqr0 and libdmtx0 packages with corresponding libdecodeqr-examples and libdmtx-utils packages containing sample programs. Then there's also QRcode.

It wouldn't be too difficult to write a small Maemo GUI for any of these libraries (certainly those with python bindings). I might even do it myself if I find the time

try the thread above, there's a version of mBarcode/maemo-barcode running on both N8X0 and N900.

@lardman
Really?

The garage page has been empty for months now. Looks abandoned with no files uploaded.

EDIT: I retract my statement, apparently there was a SVN repository under my nose the whole time!

https://garage.maemo.org/scm/?group_id=732
$ svn checkout https://garage.maemo.org/svn/maemo-barcode

Would be nicer (easier) though if such functionalty was built into the camera app - if you will, much like there is smile-detection and shake-recognition on mobile device cameras, that they could also have that ability to recognize a bar/qr code without needing to run an additional application.

Adding a new application to do something so simple creates too much friction within the user experience IMO.

To each his own. Yes it should detect a barcode - maybe decode it as well but it shouldn't process it. It should forward that to another app that can do something with it. ith dbus that would be fairly easy to forward to another app.

Well the camera source is going to be opened up so we heard, so this may well become a useful thing to do (along with lots of other cool camera processing stuff .

The only problem I envisage is that the decoding takes processing, and if you're not looking for barcodes it is a major waste of cpu cycles/power to still look for them in every frame.

With that said, I guess the barcode processor could be enabled per-session, in the same way I envisage a smile/face/blink detection plugin to be enabled per-session.

Would people prefer this type of setup to the monolithic one I have at the moment? Certainly until the camera source is opened, I could write a very basic gui (not so hot on the guis you may have noticed to scan and then output the decoded data over dbus. Will anyone use such a thing?

I think Zxing barcode scanner can help you, and it's free.
It also can be found on google easily.