iPhone QRCode Integration
For one of my jobs I had to integrate QRCodes into the app. A QRCode is a 2 dimensional barcode, like you see here:
There are several ways of generating QRCodes online, including this one for generating MeCards, and this one for generating text, URL, SMS, and phone number ones.
Integrating QRCodes into an iPhone app is pretty easy, because there’s already an open source project that does it. It’s called ZXing (or Zebra Crossing).. It’s cross platform and includes Android and other versions too. We just need to concern ourselves with the iPhone version.
Included in the project is a bunch of actions too, depending on what is encoded in the QRCode. It’ll attempt to parse the code and generate an email address or a MeCard or one of several others things as well. All the action happens in the DecoderViewController class, and presentResultForString is the method you want to look at to see what it does with the results of the image scan.
You can actually use your iPhone to take snapshots of QRCodes right from your computer’s monitor. I’ve used this method to test my app, but frankly it’s not always reliable. As well, it works a lot better with the 3GS camera than the 3G camera, because it’s just better. 
Leave a comment
Could you told me how to integrate the source code of zxing into a new iphone project in detail? Really appreciate for your help.
Samuel Cheng
22Jul10
DecoderViewController is really the place to start. Include the iPhone project into your code and then push that view controller to get the controller up and working. Set breakpoints throughout and see how the code works.
One gotcha I noticed is that in all their calls to NSLocalizedString(a,b) they have a and b in the wrong order. So I had to switch them all.
henning
23Jul10
How to install this package:
http://yannickloriot.com/2011/04/how-to-install-zxing-in-xcode-4/
Sam
14Sep11
Working on project… would like to utilize QR codes to identify when equipment needs servicing…. example would be printer needing service. Is it possible to imbed enough information so a simple scan could provide location, date, type,….. to a centralized collection website or service center. The system would have to work for 100s of units at a campus? Willing to pay for a professional…. any takers?
Frank
12Nov11
That works for sure. Especially if the mobile device has an internet connection. Then one just encodes an ID within the QR-Tag and the smartphone just looks the information up in a database online or in the intranet.
If you have questions or need a dedicated system, don’t hesitate to contact me at johannes.start@gmail.com
Johannes
09Dec11