Problem:
You wish to pay a friend with Bitcoin.
You have saved your password for MyBitcoin.com except for the last 3 letters into your mobile phone memory to save time,
but the Bitcoin address is still very long to type in.
How can this be better?
Barcodes.
There are 2 sections to this problem:
1) Generate a barcode for a bitcoin address.
2) Read a barcode using a mobile phone camera.
There are apps that can read barcodes (
http://scan.jsharkey.org/) but what I'm looking for is one that runs in the background and types in the barcode number into the webbrowser. I haven't found that yet. Here's a starter on how you might make that:
You don't need an Android phone to make an Android app. See this article:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Run-Android-Applications-on-Ubuntu-115152.shtmlYou can run an emulator on your linux or Windows box straight away, including using a PC connected webcam (see
http://scan.jsharkey.org/ )
Somebodies already on the barcode scan API:
http://code.google.com/p/zxing/It should be a simple feat to use that for copy the results from zxing into the copy/paste buffer for easy copying into the web browser.
2) Making your own Bitcoin address barcode.
Here's the list of barcode types useable with zxing:
* UPC-A and UPC-E
* EAN-8 and EAN-13
* Code 39
* Code 93
* Code 128
* QR Code
* ITF
* Codabar
* RSS-14 (all variants)
* Data Matrix
* PDF 417 ('alpha' quality)
* Aztec ('alpha' quality)
I'm now looking up how to make these....