I had the idea to use the iPhone as a remote scanner for the Delicious Library app.

The only app that I have found to do the work (stream a video from iPhone to my Mac) is PocketCam (http://www.senstic.com/iphone/pocketcam/pocketcam.aspx – €3.99 at the moment).

It installs a quicktime component that make the iPhone work as a webcam (that Delicious Library sees without problems). You have to change settings in the app to have a better resolution and you can try to stream a monochrome video (not seen great difference in result anyway). You have also to adjust the orientation of the stream (mine did get flipped horizontally…)

I have made several test and it works quite well with some caveat…

I have a 3G model so the camera and mainly it focus abilities are not so good (you have to use an external lens to try to get sharper images of a small barcode). I would like to have reports from owners of a 3GS model to see if they have better results

Another problem is that I live in Italy and the automatic search of Delicious Library does not handle well books from the italian market.

To have a feedback from the computer when the scan goes well you have to turn on the option in Delicious Library that use the text to speech syntesis to speak loud the title of the book being recognized (pump up the volume if the physical library you have is distant from you Mac).

I’ll try to add an external lens attached to the silicon case I use on my iPhone and see if the results will be better.

I would like to know also if there are other apps for the iPhone to do the same job (free is better).

I also tried to put together a small app that use the pic2shop (http://www.pic2shop.com/) app as a client to recognize only the barcode and send it to a php script that triggered an applescript to have the barcode searched in Delicious Library but the results were not good. I’ll made some more tests in the future.