After I put out a request for technologies that could use the iPhone’s camera to scan barcodes without having to call unpublished API methods, I have been contacted by Jeffrey Powers, co-founder of Occipital, the company behind the RedLaser technology.
Jeffrey has informed me that there is a just-released version of RedLaser that only uses published iPhone API calls:
“I thought you would like to know that RedLaser, as an algorithm, has nothing to do with unpublished APIs, but that video processing in general is currently impossible without unpublished API use. We have some confidence that Apple will course-correct on this issue with their next OS update. In the meantime, we do have a version of RedLaser that avoids this problem which became publicly available as of yesterday. It uses what we call “Photo-Burst” instead of the unpublished API, which means it takes a couple of snapshots very rapidly and then processes those momentarily. At the core it still uses RedLaser’s state of the art barcode recognition, and it still works on all iPhone models. (http://redlaser.com/SDK.aspx).”
Thanks for the update and the new version, Jeffrey. I am happy to point people excited by your innovative use of the phone’s camera to scan barcodes, that they can use a version that Apple are not likely to reject.
So, we’re back on track with Tesco Finder‘s technology upgrade then!