Bruji

Hello Guys,
I have to say, the ability to scan barcodes with the iSight is pretty amazing. I work for a small free press magazine in Melbourne, Australia and have a feature request (I think its more of a program request as it doesn't really fit into anything by Burji).

***Edited to keep information confidential***

So, a little app that can make a barcode and a then a little app/widget/plugin that can read these barcodes using iSight is what I'm after. Does anyone know of such a thing? Does anyone think they have the time to make one? We would be willing to fund some programing if anyone is up for it? I think a little program like this would be pretty popular.

Thanks for the help guys, keep up the amazing work.
-D.Baker

Hi,

What you are suggesting is kind of possible. I say "kind of" because I am not familiar with Firefox's plug-in architecture to be able to say if capturing the iSight feed is possible. It's certainly possible as a widget through the use of the webkit canvas tag and Quartz technology to display the iSight image. As for the barcode scanning it can be done with our free for all source for detecting the barcode. I have been meaning to clean it up; wrap it in a framework so that it becomes one line of code to call a nice iSight window and access any other attributes as well as a sample program that supports AppleScript so that non programmers can take advantage of it; as it stands now it's the code for detecting the barcode in an image and nothing more, a programmer has to add it to a project of his/her own and create the nice interface and usefulness around it.

The idea is certainly an interesting one, although not new; it's what the Digital Convergence Corporation tried to do by giving away CueCats back in the late 90s. With the iSight shipping with every Mac the penetration might be enough to make this work. Unfortunately we are in the middle of a flood of work to undertake a project like this. However if nobody has picked it up when I get around to cleaning up the iSight code, it would make the perfect test program for my easy to assemble framework and I will give it a try as part of the cleanup.

If you are really interested in funding the development of such a widget I would suggest posting an announcement on the Apple Cocoa Mailing list.

Thanks for the reply Conor. I have been looking around the web and have approached several University's to try and find someone who is able to code such an app. I'll let you know on my progress. Otherwise, please let me know how you go with your framework cleanup as perhaps we could work out a deal that benefits both of us.

Thanks again.

We will definitely keep you posted, hope the search at the universities goes well.

I have got in contact with several developers down here (both students and freelance) and I had a quick question Conor. Would it be easy to have your framework read other types of bar codes? After reading http://semacode.org/ it seems that a Data Matrix 2D code might be better than the EAN type bar code for what I am after.

Thanks again.

Because the barcode is 2D the math in our framework would be no good. It tweaked to read lines in a single dimension as binary. The way that 2D codes work is significantly different. You could use the framework to pull out the pixels out of the camera frame but then you have to code your own math to find the images. The choice of Data Matrix 2D is a good one; it has a much higher error correction than EAN has. It's a lot more complicated to do the math but easier to read blurry images.