Regular readers will know about our desire to take Tesco Finder, our store & product finding app for iPhone, on a journey where we will add new innovative features and functions based on customer feedback.
One of these functions is to use the iPhone’s camera to perform barcode scanning. An innovative solution comes from Red Laser who have their own application demonstrating the technology.
However, we’ve uncovered that Red Laser use some ‘hidden’ iPhone API calls to make their technology work, and that some other applications using their libraries to add barcode-scanning functionality have, I understand, had their apps rejected by Apple as a result.
This blog now gets accessed by just over 2,000 different IP addresses a day (mostly over RSS) – so I’m putting it to work to find an organisation who provides iPhone barcode scanning with ‘legal’ API calls that could help us.
It would be great for any organisation who provides a barcode scanning library for iPhone to get in touch with me with a view to deploying their work in Tesco Finder – and you can be sure that if it works we’ll loudly proclaim your name as well as ‘open doors’ for you.
The only caveat is that your library must only use published iPhone/Cocoa-Touch API calls and not in any way try and use hacked internal knowledge of iPhone.
If your organisation doesn’t do this but you know someone who does also please get in touch.
To contact me:
Email me at nick@lansley.com (which has a larger storage capacity than my work email!)
Call our new Tesco.com R&D Ideas In Confidence phone/fax line which is (UK) 07092 192022, (World) +44 7092 192022.