On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 5:44 PM, Jonas Sicking <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think while in theory we could rely on UAs to enable barcode entry > anywhere, which definitely would provide the maximum capabilities for > the user. In practice it seems hard to create UI which enables that > while at the same time isn't annoyingly shoving a barcode button in > your face which you generally is not interested in using. > It'd be straightforward on Android: long-touch the speech-input button (microphone icon) on the virtual keyboard to open a key list--a standard UI idiom on that platform--and put it in there, or in one of the other buttons. But yeah, until they actually do that in the first place, there's not much point to specifying a hint that basically says "so you might want to make the barcode UI more prominent for this input". (There's lots of barcode reading software on Android, but I don't think there's an API to hook it up to existing input methods. I think you'd have to release a whole standalone input method to implement it. I could be wrong, I'm not up to date on newer Android APIs.) -- Glenn Maynard
