Ian Leader: I’m playing around with QR codes a lot at the moment, and I just came across the Firefox Mobile Barcoder addon. If you mouse-over the icon in the bottom browser bar, this addon will create and display a 2 dimensional QR code containing the URL of the current web page. Then just scan it with your SmartPhone, and the URL will open in your mobile – a handy way to avoid typing on your phone:
Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work with any software on my BlackBerry Curve (8520), but it works perfectly with the barcode reader on the T-Mobile G1 (Android):
It’s a pretty cool (and actually quite useful) piece of software, but it does rather remind me of acoustic coupler modems (see pic), early modems that made noises into a normal telephone handset rather than plugging straight into the wall. Like these old modems, Barcoder is using a human interface (in this case the screen) to get small amounts of data from one very sophisticated device to another – William Gibson would be proud.
Image: MaximumPC.com
It also makes me wonder where we’ve gone wrong in terms of computer / cellphone interaction, that we can’t easily push a line of ASCII text from a laptop to our mobiles – wasn’t Bluetooth meant to solve that? A question for another post.
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Does it work with selected text, like Mobile Barcoder?
Hi Kasual – yes it does. There is a right-click context sensitive menu that will create a QR code for a hyperlink or for selected text (‘create barcode from selection’)