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There are a lot of  QR Code generators on a web and there is also listed our generator – available at http://qrcode.good-survey.com

It already went over simple generator functionality and new features are adding.

QR Codes Generator and API

Basically, beside QR Code generation, we are offering as addition:

• Tracking of generated QR Codes – for marketing managers ti know which locations work best (i.e. posters with printed QR Code)
• Dynamic QR Codes – if some QR Code is already printed you can make it point to completely different URL without changing the printed code
• Adding your logo inside QR Code (with readability testing) – branding feature
• All types of content are supported (hyperlinks, custom text, vCard, Bizcard, Mecard,  vCalendar, social networks – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Geo locations and maps, SMS messages, phones,…)
• Strong use of API – automating generation process and possibility to use from your application/website – this is what we will talk about a little bit more in this article…

Using API is not complicated at all, we wrote a tutorial which is easy to understand.

Here is an example how you can have instantly QR Code image on your website:

This are direct links:

• Hello World custom text
• Google Maps location of company’s office
• QR Code generator URL

This how it could look like inside your website (just put this hyperlink inside your IMG tag)

<img src="http://qrcode.good-survey.com/api/v2/generate?content=
http%3a%2f%2fmaps.google.com%2fmaps%3ff%3dq%26q%3d46.043286%2c14.492791300000022%
26q%3d30%2bTeslova%2bUlica%252c%2bLjubljana%2b1000%252c%2bSlovenia&
format=png&padding=2&size=10&em=byte&ec=m" alt="Avivo location" />

We all see that Mobile content is heading to Headlines and mobile world has engaged into mobile/web mix of many new and old forms such as: print, games, education …

On Mobile ground is currently most important IT battle for future dominance over mobile digital space, mobile platform and users. At that moment nobody really cares about the Internet browser fight although HTML5 trends can change all this in future. Nowadays users use phones and pads for work, social communication, games, computing, watching live events, education … and all these devices are handy and easy to use. In last two (2) years world has changed a lot and now these devices are considered as given.

Many entrepreneurs, developers and marketing managers are seeking for gold in Mobile world. The rhythm is being dictated from big and small companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, HTC, RIM, Facebook, Foursquare, Gowala, HP … How important it is can be simply shown with following diagram – how many lawsuits are undertaking between these companies at the moment. For every new trend or part of technology is a race who will be the first to release new feature, who will ship new device sooner, update operating system with new features and take the lead.

Source: http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/11/mobile-patent-lawsuits/

The mobile battle ain’t finished yet, it has just barely started

In a few years mobile market has changed dramatically and Apple is responsible for user experience and touch screen revolution with releasing iPhone back mid 2007. Apple, although not the only one company working in the touch and gesture field, at that moment was first and still has leading position on the market with new iPhone 4 and very sexy iPad. On his heals is brother Google with Android platform and new players are joining to the party. One of the big companies that missed new Mobile kick start was Microsoft, and now has  fresh new Windows Phone 7 platform launched in autumn 2010. The big question is what BlackBerry and Nokia (with QT platform) will do in the near future?

Technology should help people in their life not the opposite.
Moving contacts from one phone to another should be an easy task – couple of minutes and that’s it.
But…

• Nokia (model E51) using Nokia PC Suite can export contacts only to CSV or TXT format
• Android Samsung Galaxy S i9000 can read vcf (vCard) format from its memory card

That means not a happy marriage, or marriage that started with a divorce.

The first task in resolving this conflict will be:

Use Nokia PC Suite to synchronize your phone with Microsoft Outlook so you will get all your Nokia contacts in MS Outlook

OMG, MS Outlook can’t export contacts as vCards (it can import them from vCards, but no export).

But, there is a way (and this will be second step):

(Outlook 2007 version) Go to your Contacts and select all of them and then click on
Actions menu > Send Full Contact > In Internet Format (vCard)

And if you have a lot of contacts your Outlook (2007 version) will give you this error message:

When you do some search you will find out that you should delete files in Temp Outlook folder and to check this folder permissions, there is also a small tool to do this – but that didn’t help us out and we got the same message Cannot create file: Olktmp.vcf. Right-click the folder…

We found out that number of contacts you want to export is important and you can’t export them all (if you have many contacts) but you need to pick smaller number of selected contacts.

It helped us only to choose a smaller amount of contacts – about 50 contacts and then click on:
Actions > Send Full Contact > In Internet Format (vCard)

New mail message will open so send it to one your email.

In this email you will get vCards as attachments, so save them all to the disk to one chosen folder.

After repeating this operation you will get all your contacts as vCards in one folder.

So, finally you are ready to copy them to Samsung Galaxy S smartphone, but it is problem because you will need (when importing copied contacts in your phone) to confirm ever contact and this can take a time if you have a lot of them.

There is a trick to combine/join/merge all vcf (vCard) contacts into on vcf (vCard) file (in Windows OS) by typing this DOS command:

copy *.vcf AllMyContacts.vcf

Now, upload AllMyContacts.vcf to your Android smartphone’s SD cartd and go to the Contacts > Menu “More” > Import/Export >Import from SD card > choose one file (AllMyContacts.vcf)

Finally, we have them

Intro
We like the taste of MVC in ASP .NET and have some practical experiences in coding Java applets, J2ME and Silverlight applications.

Lately our team decided to build a simple application for Android phone to try the platform. Story begins with an idea and motivation, installing and setting Eclipse + Android SDK, and like always, a sketch, todo list, etc.

Issues

• For each property in layout xml the “android:” namespace is needed. Of course it can be replace with “a” but it still annoying to write it every time. Example <LinearLayout android:id=”@+id/pnlSomething” />   There is more advanced graphical xml standard – SVG
• oops, I tried (miss-clicked) to run android as classic Java application but it returns an error (like build error),
  next time I try running as android application this error wont go away even if the code is fine
  solution: delete error from the error list and it should work fine
• sometimes I run a debug and don’t notice the tiny icon in the far right bottom corner of eclipse
  that shows the application is launching and it’s stuck… and I try to launch it again, and again
  and applications are trying to launch parallel… solution: close eclipse and start again
• connection refused on localhost? is this a joke? is only google.com allowed?
  firefox opens it normally, firewall is off, same on IIS and apache, permissions are set in manifest.xml
  reason: ‘localhost’ means the internal loopback of device (emulator) not the PC,
  solution: use your LAN IP
  //solution: edit hosts and set something like 127.0.0.1   pc-localhost //does not work
  http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/801645febf0523ea/9e779925e9570828
• when a crash occurs it is just a crash, without detailed message or tip, developer should guess the error
  * and, BTW, emulator shows wrong time on windows (7:04 PM while the real time is 21:04 on GMT+1 timezone
  or 5:07 PM when the time is 19:07)
• Record breaker among IDEs: 1.131 GB of RAM taken by Eclipse
• A lot of features: social media, web, google maps, sqlite, bluetooth,
• gestures, camera, speech recognition, 3D, processing…
• s it easy to learn? theory yes, it is logical and quite simple, well documented;
  but dealing with basic practical issues is a pain

What really annoys us is that when we write layout in xml and we are confidant with it schema is right, works in theory, draws a preview but just don’t work in emulator Eclipse won’t tell what is the problem it just says “Source Not Found.”

Comparison: C# vs Java

A good programming language uses less code and effort to complete a task. What makes Silverlight (C#) coding easier and Android (Java) coding harder? Advantages of C# over Java or what is missing in Java:

• lambda expression and Linq make handling data, arrays, xml easy
• properties
• partial types when dealing with large files
• preprocessor directives (#if, #region) to bring visual focus on the particular part of code that is being developed and hide the other code
• verbatim string, like @”C:\Program Files\android\sdk.exe” without escape characters
• nullable types, like int? that can be -n…0, 1, 2…n or null
• ‘yield’ keyword
• ‘??’ operator
• enumerations that are avoided in Android (Android uses constants, requires documentation to locate a constant)

* comparing to Silverlight you need to write more code in a more complex way for same features (ie. async, binding,
db, events)