Lasagne is a small app that mainly involves a spreadsheet hooked up to a barcode reader, the intention being that this should make it easy to create and manage lists of items that are tagged with barcodes. This could be a collection of books, CDs, DVDs, or BDs; but it could also be the UPC codes off of grocery-store items (to create a shopping list), or even your own set of barcodes made to manage your own items.

This app uses the ZBar bar code library, which is the same library used by MBarcode; this provides quick and easy retrieval of barcodes in many different conditions. To some extent, the only significant advantage Lasagne has over MBarcode is the close integration with spreadsheet functionality, allowing easier collection and manipulation of large sets of barcodes.

Spreadsheet data is stored in Comma Separated Values (CSV) format, which should allow for fairly easy import into standard desktop spreadsheet apps.

Please note that this version (0.1.0) is at this point still a work-in-progress; I basically just ripped the barcode scanner out of another project I've been working on, and welded it to a miniature spreadsheet example I'd seen some time ago. The app is more-or-less working right now, so I figured I should go ahead and see what folks think about it; but there is still a lot of work left to do!

The current system has a number of limitations. For example, the columns of the spreadsheet are fixed at "Barcode", "Name", "Description", "Quantity", and "Location"; I expect it'll take a bit of work to generalize Lasagne to allow for user-defined fields.

One item of particular note: I'm still using Qt's default file dialogs in this version. These dialogs leave a lot to be desired; and in particular, there is no usable dialog for creating a new file. For now, if you want to create a new spreadsheet file, the best solution is probably to use the "Save As" button for your current spreadsheet, and then delete all the rows by hand.

Another item of note: the standard Camera app does not play nice with Lasagne. (Actually, I don't think the Camera app plays nice with anybody.) In order to get Lasagne to work, I have it kill the Camera app when it starts, and restart it upon exiting. Trying to start the Camera app while Lasagne is running can cause confusion in both of them (at the least!), so please be advised.

Given all that, I do hope you find this app fun and useful!

Also, I made a pretty awful video of me using Lasagna in its current form, which you can find at:

https://youtu.be/j_WChlrJ3pk

My only excuse is that I was pretty tired when I filmed that. I'll try to make a better video some time in the future...