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’)
Sounds like a good add on but I’m not sure why would you want to open a website on your mobile if you are looking at it on your computer?
My main use case was to search for and read about software for my blackberry in Firefox on my laptop, and then send a link to download software onto my blackberry. Ian.