has anyone thought of having iphone/andoid apps to act as bar-code scanners and handling infrastructure tasks (shelving, checkin, etc) I know I've heard of such apps that take pictures of the bar code, decode it and do various things with it, with the prevalence of such phones and the relative scarcity of dedicated bar-code scanners, it seems like having something like this would be handy. David Lang
* david@lang.hm (david@lang.hm) wrote:
has anyone thought of having iphone/andoid apps to act as bar-code scanners and handling infrastructure tasks (shelving, checkin, etc)
I know I've heard of such apps that take pictures of the bar code, decode it and do various things with it, with the prevalence of such phones and the relative scarcity of dedicated bar-code scanners, it seems like having something like this would be handy.
Hi David Funny you should mention that, yes we have. In fact we are using an android app + koha to circulate conference attendees at Kohacon. Reed from my work has built a fairly rudimentary back working webscan tool that works just fine with Koha's circulation module. Each attendee is going to have a qr code, which maps to an item in the Koha catalogue and we will 'issue' them out to the conference venue at the registration desk. Course there is no reason that if this works well enough you couldn't use this for real. I think Reed is planing to polish it a bit more then put it out there for people to use. Hope this helps Chris -- Chris Cormack Catalyst IT Ltd. +64 4 803 2238 PO Box 11-053, Manners St, Wellington 6142, New Zealand
2010/10/16 Chris Cormack <chrisc@catalyst.net.nz>:
* david@lang.hm (david@lang.hm) wrote:
has anyone thought of having iphone/andoid apps to act as bar-code scanners and handling infrastructure tasks (shelving, checkin, etc)
I think Reed is planing to polish it a bit more then put it out there for people to use.
see- http://reedwade.net/android/webscan/ it's on the android market already, search for webscan This was very much a my third experiment with android apps so the code does need a good cleaning and documenting before putting out there for the world to see but am happy to send it to anyone who wants an early peek. Barcode decoding is via ZXing ( http://code.google.com/p/zxing/ ) which makes it very simple. What I've done is very browser based and generic. I can imagine a more Koha targeted app which used webkit plus additional JS hooks to provide something a bit tidier and could even coast over connectivity gaps nicely. -- Another path would be to use jqtouch ( http://jqtouch.com/ ), stay browser focused but with pages tuned to android+iphone. We could keep the android scanner JS hook but I have no clue about how to scan a barcode using an iphone. The shift to template toolkit which is coming up should make alternate site types like this a bit simpler. (But I use template toolkit a lot so...) -reed
On 16 October 2010 09:16, Reed Wade <reedwade@gmail.com> wrote:
2010/10/16 Chris Cormack <chrisc@catalyst.net.nz>:
* david@lang.hm (david@lang.hm) wrote:
has anyone thought of having iphone/andoid apps to act as bar-code scanners and handling infrastructure tasks (shelving, checkin, etc)
I think Reed is planing to polish it a bit more then put it out there for people to use.
see-
Looks really interesting! And this might be a good opportunity to plug one of my own current "hobby" projects, which I have called moBibl - a mobile, web-app interface for libraries. Currently there are two versions, the original is based on jQTouch and available here: http://mobibl.no/ Source code: http://github.com/MagnusEnger/moBibl I have run into some problems with jQTouch, so currently I am trying to rework what I have done with iUI: http://dev.mobibl.no/ Source code: http://github.com/MagnusEnger/moBibl-iUI (Warning! This code is even more of a mess than the one above. Not for the faint of heart!) These are both very much works in progress, some things work and some things don't, the code probably makes it obvious that I am not really a programmer, installation instructions are non-existent etc... The functionality is currently limited to - searching (based on Z39.50/SRU through the Glitre component (http://github.com/glitre/glitre) that I am working on for another project) and - news items, based on RSS. The good thing is that it should work with any ILS that has Z39.50 or SRU (Glitre might need some tweaking, though). In time I dream of implementing some Koha-specific functionality, specifically all the functionality made possible by Koha's ILS-DI protocol (both in order to be useful to patrons and to show off what can be done with an ILS that supports cool protocols and APIs). If anyone finds this interesting and would like to chip in I'd be delighted! May the source be with you! Magnus Enger libriotech.no
On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 10:18 PM, Magnus Enger <magnus@enger.priv.no> wrote:
And this might be a good opportunity to plug one of my own current "hobby" projects, which I have called moBibl - a mobile, web-app interface for libraries.
Currently there are two versions, the original is based on jQTouch and available here: http://mobibl.no/ Source code: http://github.com/MagnusEnger/moBibl
I have run into some problems with jQTouch, so currently I am trying to rework what I have done with iUI: http://dev.mobibl.no/ Source code: http://github.com/MagnusEnger/moBibl-iUI (Warning! This code is even more of a mess than the one above. Not for the faint of heart!)
very nice lots of possibilities -reed
participants (4)
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Chris Cormack -
david＠lang.hm -
Magnus Enger -
Reed Wade