Yeah, Lasagne is effectively a piece of this larger app I've been wanting to create. I've kind of fallen in love with the concept of the Amazon app, where you point your portable device at a random object, hit a button, and "poof!" lots of useful information appears about it. The problem for me is that you have to get that info over the net, which requires (a) a decent internet connection, and (b) revealing your interest in that object to Amazon (or whoever may be reading your network). I'm hoping that bundling a barcode scanner and a local database of information about a particular class of items together into a single app would be something that I could sell.

But that's been taking a lot of time for me to work out. In the meantime, I just wanted to get folks using the Zbar library a bit more. In particular, to use it without bothering with the autofocus; everyone (Amazon, MBarcode, practically every other app I've tried) wants you to put the phone in front of a barcode and then wait for the autofocus to do its magic. This takes way too much time! Most of the time, you can easily just put the camera at an adequate distance by yourself, and Zbar will pick up the code almost immediately.

My plan is to flesh out this app and get it working well, and use what I've learned to finally get the original app up and running.