Here's a link on Google Code: konzoomer

I thought I was clever back in november by giving it the code-name 'Polaroid Android', hehe ... (*notices no-one is laughing*) ... anyways it's a barcode scanning program ... mostly for your daily groceries - and stuff, duh!

Very cool I did the same

Exactly the same or a variant?

konzoomer is mostly concerned with daily groceries - Jeffrey Sharkey's application works best with CD's & books.

I hope variant

But, my app is for everything on the earth which has a barcode

Book, revu, coca cola, electronic parts, television, ... everything.

Well so it mine!

And my penis is bigger than yours ... and Jeffrey's

(*Feels his inferiority complex now*)

I hope judges will choose similar project for the second round to create competition!

so good luck

Hehe, kidding aside - I spent a lot of time in the beginning of the project setting up data-harvesting robots. This really wasn't necessary for this competition, but a real world application is useless without data.
So - as I also write in my document, I have around 75.000 items and around 400.000 prices from 6 different supermarket chains/online stores, namely SuperBest (DK), Tesco (GB), Sainsbury's (GB), Netgrocer (US - online only), Groceries Express (US - online only) and ShopRite (US).

Your harvesting will be very helpful for the second round.

In my application, I hardcoded all the informations about product, price, location, ...

In fact the problem with this king of app is the database.

Many options exist to populate it.

Searching the data or getting it.

My Harvester beats your harvester

Oh yeah? Well, we have computers, which can beat your computers ...

PS: I didn't have anything to do with the making of this demo

Good tool Stell,

But will the end-users use your app in an Android phone instead of buying a normal bar code scanner which is cheaper and more professional than an Androidphone in scanning bar code?

Minh

Steel wrote:Oh yeah? Well, we have computers, which can beat your computers ...

That was exactly what I was referring to
Those guys have a hilarious humor.
But back to Topic, I tested ZXing myself and was very disappointed by the recognition rate. While the rate is quite good when you have nice lighting, the right distance to the object and a camera that does not suck, those conditions are not meet often in the outside.
Android is not an iPhone! It is not only designed for expensive smartphones, but also for cheap phones. And even in smart phones you still see unfocusable cameras, plus running zxing on a real mobile phone takes longer to recognize the barcode.
Another fancy problem are barcodes that are printed on a sphere or a red-background. Red backgrounds are allowed because most barcode scanners use red-light any way.
My final conclusion was thus to leave the barcode feature out and only support the entering of the barcode

I know for a fact that the pictures a Sony Ericsson P990i can take are more than enough for my barcode-scanning algorithm! (Because I have that phone and I tested it back in November/December)

Okay the camera on that phone was very advanced when it was released, but that was in August, 2006. The most important feature of this camera is that you can set it's auto-focus mode to 'macro', and that gives very crisp pictures at close range (If I disabled auto-focus I couldn't set it manually).

Although this was a very high-end phone 2 years ago usually the high-tech stuff finds it's way into cheaper phones over time...

Since May 2008 this project was continued on Java ME, so it works on normal phones.
You can see an older demo here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c96OUNo3VFo

The closed BETA is running here:
http://konzoomer.com

Sorry for the shameless self-promotion