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

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Thursday 15 October 2009 09:10:44 Simon Pickering wrote:
> Replying to myself, another option (which is the same one that Android
> Scan/CompareEverywhere uses) would be to move the "scraping" to a
> server. This might let me use a single key for all the queries (though
> it may still break the terms and conditions, I'd have to look) and would
> also reduce on-device processing and the amount of data that needs to be
> transferred.

While you are tolerating discussion of enhancements!...

If you do use a server, it would be great if you implemented an "offline" mode 
where I could scan barcodes all day without network connectivity and, later, 
process them when I am online.  Some of the places one might want to scan 
barcodes (barcodes on display adverts, on buildings like in Westergasfabriek, 
or in warehouses) might not have great network connectivity.  Most 
professional barcode readers which I know of seem to do the scanning offline 
and process the barcodes once they are plugged into their docking/charging 
station.

This brings up a slightly larger question of how modular is your current 
implementation?  It feels like it would be good to have a library (accessible 
from C and Python) which would have an API like "scan the barcode the user is 
currently pointing the camera at and give me back something that tells me 
what sort of barcode it was and the data it contains" (maybe with some sort 
of callbacks to allow some user interaction if needed to give them 
help/feedback with the scanning).  

The subsequent processing (database, lookup, etc, etc.) is the sort of thing 
that various people might create separate applications for, although it might 
be useful to expose some useful APIs there as well: "lookup this barcode 
number on Amazon", "save this barcode in barcode database called 'My Books'", 
etc.

Is that how it works at the moment or something you are looking in to?

Graham