09 Feb qr-send: a simple image-based transmission method
Long time no post. So to make it easy for myself to get things started for this new year, I will post about something small and simple. Namely, qr-send.
qr-send is a solution to the problem of “How do I get short bits of text from my computer to my phone?”
Sometimes there might be a URL or a short bit of text you need to get onto your phone for whatever reason. Maybe you find an article you want to read later on your way home from work, maybe you have a bit of text in a document that you want to text over to a friend, or if you are a web-developer like me, you might want to open a website in your device’s web-browser to make sure everything works on the smaller screen.
Sure, you could just type it out. But unless the text is really short then that might not be that easy. You might have a long and complicated URL or other bit of text which contains a bunch of random looking characters, like a hex-encoded hash. Then it would be both tedious to type it out by hand, and there would be a high risk of making mistakes. So manual typing here is not an option.
Now, depending on your device, you might have a whole range of other options available. You could send it via Wifi, but what protocol would you use, and what about security? You could use Bluetooth, but you would need a Bluetooth dongle in your computer. Also many of these options requires a fair bit of configuration to get working satisfactory. You could also download some App™ to both your computer and your device which sends the text via The Cloud™ somehow, but personally I try and avoid those sorts of solutions as much as I can.
qr-send, however, is a very simple solution to this problem (At least compared to some of my examples above). All it does, is it takes the text you wish to send as it’s input, encodes that text into a QR Code image, and then displays that image on your screen. And then all you have to do is open up your QR Code scanner of choice on your device and scan the code, and the text will appear on your phone ready to be copied opened with your browser or copied to wherever it’s needed. Simple as that.
