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5 Responses to “semacode 1.5 released”

1. charlie Says:
   July 25th, 2005 at 2:24 am

   erik, i wonder if semacode could be used to facilitate bluetooth pairing. one solution would be to have a semacode sticker on the phone and the app would do the pairing without searching, alternately, is the camera and semacode good enough to read a semacode on the phone’s screen.

   if the semacode app and camera could read a semacode off the screen, then i could think of a few cool apps that could help there. sure we have bluetooth, but sometimes, you just want to touch and get it over with. this way we wouldn’t have to wait for rfid, which needs hardware. semacode could do this all in sw.

   just a thought.

2. erik Says:
   July 25th, 2005 at 2:00 pm

   Hmmm… I have been able to read a semacode off an LCD monitor, but I had to make the image quite large for it to work (and I’ve got a 7610, which has a megapixel camera.) I haven’t tried scanning another phone screen. I’ll have to try that once I’m back in the office.

   Semacode’s are meant to contain URL’s, but I gather the payload can be any text string, so it should be easy enough to put a Bluetooth address in there…

3. David Adams Says:
   July 25th, 2005 at 11:06 pm

   Semacode API’s in Python for Series 60; Now you have my attention!

4. Kevin Slavin Says:
   July 26th, 2005 at 11:48 pm

   hey erik — saw this off unmediated –

   so from a licensee perspective, I think we’ve got more experience with semacode than anyone around (which speaks to the fact that we’re fond of it). We haven’t played with the 1.5 Java release yet, but to answer two questions you raise, from our experience:

   1) you can shoot code off a screen, but we ran into trouble when it was an old-school monitor or TV with standard screen refresh rates. Anything LCD worked ok provided we had sufficient size, focus and pixel resolution. Keep in mind that shorter strings of text create less complex codes, and therefore require less resolution, etc. THink also about focal distance for the lens, etc.

   2) yes, you can encode anything you want into semacode format, but the 1.5 java software is, in all likelihood, looking for a URL to resolve. But you should send a note to simon@semacode.org and take it up with him; he’s interested in making semacode as useful and as innovative as possible.

   good luck. It’s amazing stuff.

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