qreator-discuss team mailing list archive

[David Planella <david.planella@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Al 14/06/13 11:41, En/na Stefan Schwarzburg ha escrit:
> Hi David,
> 
> at the moment I am looking into mobile apps for the iPhone that let
> scientists scan the barcode or the ISBN of a book and enter the
> corresponding citation into zotero [1] (for the institute where my wife
> works).
> 
> And I remembered that you wanted to support 1D barcodes as well with
> Qreator. However, the big question is, what do you do after you have
> scanned such a code. For literature citations there are many online
> tools like Zotero or Mendeley, so the question would be: which tool /
> service to use?
> From the Qreator perspective this probably means that we either have to
> use plugins, or a selection of possible services on each scan, or that
> we do not support 1D barcodes at all (apart from "copy content").
> 

Good question. I think for the first release of Qreator Touch we should
simply support the "Copy content" action. I haven't actually tested 1D
codes, but the zxing library we're using supports them out of the box,
so it should be cheap to provide scanning support at least.

Going forward, I can think of two options:

1) Support only online services and open the browser sending the scanned
   content
2) Make it easier to use Qreator from other external apps, so that
   Qreator takes care of the scanning and simply sends it to the apps

I'm personally favouring 2) -although it should not be too difficult to
support 1) for those codes where there is no current native app
available. As an example, I'd love to have a Library app with which I
can scan and save the books I've read. However, that is a full app in
itself, and it should not be part of Qreator. But we should make it
possible for the developer of the Library app to invoke Qreator, scan a
code and return the result. In other words, Qreator should have an API
or be more plugin-like.

I must admit, though, that I still don't know how to do that in the QML
world :)

A real-life example is the Google authenticator app in Android: to
provide a one-time 2-factor auth code it lets you scan a QR code. When
it does, it simply invokes the "Scanner" app to scan the code.

> I know that you want to keep qreator as simple as possible... but I
> would suggest that we at least keep in mind that questions like this
> will appear in the future and that we should have a good answer to them.
> 

Absolutely, makes sense.

Cheers,
David.

> Cheers,
> Stefan 
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.zotero.org/
> 
>