[maemo-developers] mbarcode/maemo-barcode dialog oddity and progress report

[From: Simon Pickering]

Hi all

I've been hacking away at maemo-barcode (now called mbarcode to remove
the maemo bit as we're not supposed to use that;) and have made some
progress.

The code is here:
https://garage.maemo.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/branches/simon_wip/maemo-barcode/?root=maemo-barcode

binaries here: (you need to install libdmtx0, then just run the mbarcode
binary after chmod'ing it):
http://people.bath.ac.uk/enpsgp/nokia770/mbarcode/fremantle/

I should add that the code should also run on Diablo, but the diablo dir
on the above webpage is out of date so you'll need to compile it
yourself (please let me know if it doesn't compile/run). I plan on
supporting both Fremantle and Diablo devices, don't worry!

In terms of features:
1D (EAN13/UPC12), datamatrix and QR codes are supported.

For 1D codes mbarcode will attempt a very basic webscrape of Amazon and
will (hopefully) return a title (rather than a segfault). For URLs
encoded in a QR code/datamatrix it will open the webbrowser and for
vCards it will add them to your contacts.

The UI is very rough and ready and needs serious work; the webscraper is
very basic and could do with more love (there are some other basic codes
in the source, but they are disabled as I've not had time to debug them
yet); the database functions on the latter notebook pages also need
serious work (the goal being to be able to store details about barcodes
you've scanned - mainly 1D products, e.g. DVDs, Books, etc.).

So all in all it's still work in progress, but it does at least work
well enough to test. Except that I use dialogs to ask the user if they
want to open a decoded URL/add a decoded vCard, and if these dialogs are
displayed the UI locks up straight afterwards. If I comment them out the
code continues quite happily after opening the browser/adding the URL,
so the fault must presumably lie with the dialogs.

Any ideas what might be going wrong here?

I am also open, of course, to patches for anything, but especially
webscraping fixes, debianisation, UI thoughts, etc.

I imagine I'm going to have to split the source code into some separate
files for diablo/fremantle (e.g. camera code, gui code as these will be
significantly different) rather than using lots of #ifdefs, does this
sound reasonable?

Thanks for looking,


Simon