Casey West, the devil that he is, turned me on to QR Code recently. I’ve seen these things popping up in ads and android-centric blogs in the last few months. At its core, qr code (and quickcode and a few other similar data types) are 21st century barcodes. They carry a lot more data in a redundant fashion. Their first niche was commercial package tracking and then Japanese culture found them, popularizing them by throwing qrcodes on everything. They’re a very standard form of advertising, apparently.

The codes hold text. Standard payloads these days include vcards, urls, and small text blobs. (There’s even a blog where the posts are qrcodes.)

If you’re reading this on my site, off to the right you’ll notice two codes. They’re the same data encoded two ways. The top is quickcode and the bottom is qrcode. They contain a small vcard. The qrcode version is for standard apps while the quickcode one is much more easily read by my old crappy iphone’s camera.

Want to be trendy? Here are the tools I’m using. As always, except where noted below, Google is your friend if you want to find alternate offerings.

• Kaywa has a great tool on their site for generating qrcodes.
• For my iPhone, I use Quickmark. It costs $1, at time of writing, and is quite worth it, in my opinion. Not only does it read several types of barcodes but it can generate quickcodes or qrcodes for text, urls, or address book entries in your phone. Quickmark generated the codes used on my site. It works well on my old edge-only iphone
• For my Sony Ericsson, I use BeeTagg. It proxies urls through their site so they can occasionally insert ads.
• I’m not using it (yet?) currently but a great qrcode-for-an-url generator seems to be the Mobile Barcoder plugin for firefox

There remains one HUGE gap. It’s awesome to be able to read and use qrcodes from my mobile device. That’s the japanese-driven market for them. qrcodes are starting to become pretty popular on the web too and I simply refuse to point my damn phone at my screen whenever I see a code. Sadly, there are not too many options that I’ve found. This is where Google is major fail. Usually a fountain of awesome, it has very few offerings.

So, using the Zebra Crossing projects’s online decoder, I whipped up a pair of bookmarklets. View the qrcode image and hit the bookmarklet. BAM! you can haz data. There’s one big caveat here. zxing, at time of writing, only supports qrcodes.

• qrcode decode - This provides full decode output with lots of info.
• qrcode decode - This provides just the content of the qrcode

So there you go. I’m still a n00b in these regards but so far so good. If I see you at a conference or something in the near future, expect me to be throwing urls or whatever at you via qrcodes on my phone.