iPhone ideas

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.

I wrote some months ago to the guys behind Delicious Library 2, the cataloging application that has now finally been released, asking if they where to release a client application to be used on the iPhone. They answered that they had thought about it… and they did not gave me other details.

Now I would like to write down here how I would like that client app to be made:

• Barcode scanning with the iPhone camera
  2 modes: direct sending to Delicious Library (interactive mode) for the immediate scanning of the barcode or storage mode, you save on the iPhone all the barcodes you want to scan and send them to Delicious Library when you have finished… that could be good for scanning all the books you have in your garage…
• Wi-fi communication between client app and Delicious Library with bonjour discovery of one another
• you should be able to take photos of the cover of your book so you can use them if the barcode scanning does not match (or your books are too old and without barcodes on their cover)
• the app should let you browse your library on the iphone, or via wi-fi or having a low-res copy of the entire library stored on the iPhone itself, I know you already have the possibility to export your library to HTML pages but I think browsing in an application could be better

It could be possible to make a client application for a game (racing game or similar would be the best example) that provide the accelerometer input to your mac to control your car. We have just seen in the WWDC2008 keynote some games on the iPhone that use that input. Providing it to a game could be funny… You move your iPhone to steer, accelerate or decelerate holding your left or right thumb on the screen and change gear with a sudden pitch (rotation forward and back – or back and forward on the x axis). You could also have an area on the iPhone to pause the game…
I hope the image is clearer than what I have written down…

I don’t know if it’s technically feasible but perhaps using the data from accelerometers on the iPhone and with the help of something to stitch the iPhone to your hand a 3D joystick could be made. I mean something to control an application or a game on your Mac like you do with a Wiimote… It comes to mind that if it could be made by mean only of accelerometers the guys at Nintendo would have not used the IR sensors together with the accelerometers…. Just another silly idea perhaps…

I was thinking about an application like a Voice Notes app  that records what you say in the iPhone microphone. It could also try to discover (via Bonjour) a Speech Recognition service on your home network (hosted on your home mac/pc) that could convert your recorded audio in text format and send it back to the Voice Notes app, ready to be associated with the recorded audio to make it easy to do a keyword search on your voice notes. I think the Voice Notes app already exists… I have found something from erica sadun…