Category Archives: Standards

Looking for the best mobile browser

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At mobile browsers compatibility test website from w3c we found a page where you can test how good your mobile browser is. You can access the URL by 3 different ways:

- Typing the URL (http://dev.w3.org/2008/mobile-test/test.html (quite creepy).
- A short URL (using a URL at tinyurl.com)
- But, the most interesting one in by a QR-Code we can capture and have intant access to test our mobile browser.

At the W3C they use QR-Codes!!

It is a very complete test that checks the standards to take into consideration when displaying a website in a mobile display:

Ilustración sobre factores que evalúa el test I want to pass the test now!

If you want to see the results and see the performance on different mobiles here you have them. “And the winner is…”

Continue reading →

Leonardo’s Lesson

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According to Denso-Wave technical specifications about QR-Codes, when printing or displaying a QR-Code there has to be a margin/“quiet zone” around it in order to locate it and decode it properly. This “quiet zone” must have a minimum of 4 modules (a module has the size the smallest square in a QR).

qr-code quiet zone

In order to show this feature we designed at our QR-Store Leonardo’s Series where you can see that the margin required. When we designed the first version of the T-Shirt there was no margin and the code was very hard to capture. Check it yourself:

quiet-zone.gif

Bonus freak: in our code there is a message from Leonardo himself that can only be decoded when captured from the reflection ina mirror.

QR-Code T-Shirt

Android (… and more Google)

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Adroid

“The Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies, is developing Android: the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. To help developers get started developing new applications, we’re offering an early look at the Android Software Development Kit.” (Source Google)

We miss Nokia at the OHA Members list – Open Handset Alliance, but it seems serious , with possiblities and a cool project. Good luck!

Here you can see a presentation video of the Android Project. Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz explain better than we will ever do what the project is about and what are Google’s expectations.

Obviously project ZXing (see post January 9th) has its Android’s version.

[SWF]http://www.youtube.com/v/1FJHYqE0RDg,485,405[/SWF]

MC2 – News

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We have talked about this organization before in this blog, but we remind you here what the MC2 is by copy+pasting their mission statement: “To create standards to ensure interoperability, to ensure a business framework for profitable growth, and to encourage and educate the market in general. ”

mc2.gif

You can see all about the Mobile Codes Consortium at http://www.mobilecodes.org or read their full mission statement document.

Recently they posted a new document about their last activities and thoughts.

pdf.gif “Global mobile industry bodies GSMA and OMA commit to drive worldwide mobile barcodes standards” – December 17th, 2007.

Generating QR-Codes

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After quite a few requests about “how to generate a QR-Code” and what libraries are we using we will tell you in this post and also other ways to do so.

Let’s start with the library we use to generate QRs online. You can find it here. It’s a japanese website but the very last link links to the library itself. There will probably be other libraries available on the net, based on Java or other languages,but the one we are using is the one we just mentioned.

There are also some off-line software to generare ourown QR-Codes. Here you have the links we found:

So far we just found there three (all of them in Japanese). From Google Translator you can easily translate from Japanese into English. We hope this post to be helpful and you have any question we will try to answer :)

structure-of-qrcode.gif

Standards 101

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From this informative and research blog we are not qualified to technically evaluate which is the best solutions (but this is the least important). The question is that this technology is about to come and it will rock.

Nowadays the are two main players:

* QR-Code – Densowave – JIS / ISO
* Datamatrix - Siemens AG – ISO

Behind them, there some other players with more commercial purposes on the short-term (Ex. Shotcode). There is another critical aspect: the patents. We are plannig to work on a post about it.

THe MC2 Mobile Consortium is gathering companys from communication, software, telecommunications, etc….and set standards regarding de codes and its contents.

An interesting Publics study insisits on this need of standarization in order to launch this tecnology properly.

¿Does anyone know or has any idea about the situation right now?