Notices

Locking the screen might switch off the camera (while the pipeline thinks it's still ready), I suppose we should check if the app has been backgrounded and pause the pipeline in that case.

That sounds reasonable. I'll see if I can get the time to debug it.

Suggestion.

Right now half-press of camera button focuses the camera, and full-press saves the image (I rarely need saving the image from mbarcode, and the button on the right side of the touchscreen is quite enough).

I would prefer to have full-press scanning the image for barcode, because I suppose that scanning the camera image every millisecond for barcode spends the battery and uses too much CPU.

MBarcode can take 15.9%-17.6%-18.2% of CPU when lens is closed (what are there 50-60-70 fps doing here?), about 50% CPU when scanning, about 5% CPU when on results page. In the first and third case it should be doing exactly nothing; and in the second case I would prefer to tell it manually when to scan the barcode, not to have it automatically trying and trying and trying all the while I haven't put the camera in the best position to see the barcode yet.

I have already turned off automatic focus in the options because I didn't like the sound of moving parts in the camera (it would wear away if barcodes were scanned frequently with automatic focus). Now I would be thankful if you made the option to turn off auto-scanning and make it manual.

The 50-70 FPS is the cap when the lens is open. It is supposed to be lowered to 2 FPS when the lens is closed, but I guess there is a bug here somewhere - which I'll fix eventually

The CPU usage when the lens is closed is 2-7 % on my device, which still is a bit too high, but I guess this is because of the 2 FPS. In fact, it could be lowered to 0 FPS, as there is nothing to be redrawn and rather implement a manual redraw function if necessary. I'll see if this helps. The result page CPU usage is probably also because of unecessary redraws causing CPU wake-ups.

I'll see if we can add an option to manually tell mBarcode to scan, but I don't have the time to do it right away, so it might take some time if I get to it.

I like this idea. I suppose we should enable it as an option (should be pretty easy to do), I'll do some hacking this afternoon.

Great! Thanks for taking a look at this one

Two issues I have found in the current mbarcode:
1) It is not quite clear when mbarcode actually makes a shot. More than once I continued feverishly clicking the shutter button.
2) Once you click on one of the plugins, the application seemingly hangs, and may continue in this state for a minute or so (while it is searching for your barcode). It should show the "busy" status instead (rotating thingie in the menu bar may do).

It (currently) continuously tries to make a shot, and makes it as soon as it can read the barcode.

"Busy" status might be added to mbarcode (just to confirm you have clicked). But "hanging" when you click on a plugin is caused by the plugin: action after clicking the plugin is defined by the plugin.

Yes, I have no problems with hanging at this particular point: the plugin has to do its job. But the program should somehow indicate that it is busy.

An indicator is a very good idea. At the moment, there is also some problems with the list not giving the user any feedback when an item is actually clicked. I'll see if I can figure this out.

Most plugins react almost instantaneously on my device, but the Informed Individual server is down (the project is in an early alpha stage) and because of this, the plugin uses a huge amount of time to wait for the request to the server to time out. So if this is the plugin in question, I experience the same delay without any user feedback, as well.