Hacker News Reader

Comment by klinquist | Hacker News Reader

I do believe I've found a decent use for them - I wrote an app that can push an iOS mobile provisioning wifi profile to an iPhone - this allows your guests to scan a QR code to have their iOS device connect to your wifi network (without directly sharing your WPA key with them). You can even geofence the QR code so that if it is scanned > 1/2 mile from your home, the profile will not be pushed.

You must use RedLaser to scan the QR code - it is the only that pushes URLs out to Safari (instead of to an internal web-view) which allows the profile to be pushed.

http://www.getonmywifi.com.

View on HN

There are definitely decent uses for QR codes.

For instance in my lab, we've used QR codes containing YAML to allow any user to load up the appropriate configuration file in a custom built generic-purpose app to interact with a specific tangible system.

A concrete use of that would be as follow— imagine a museum with various installations, all of which you can interact with using your smartphone. Each installation could have a QR code next to it, which you scan from an app— which would then load up the proper UI for you to interact with the installation (the QR code could point to interpretable markup code for building a UI , etc.).

QR codes are great when you need to give your users instant access to more than ~20 characters of information (less than that and is just faster to type) OR non human interpretable information. Unfortunately, most people use them for URLs, which actually fill both these criteria.

FYI: There is an app for Android doing the same (works great): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.proj.wifij...

I printed Marvin the Paranoid Android pointing to a fat QR code with extra text saying sth like 'internets r here... and ur emailz, too.'

One of the best QR code use cases, I believe.

edit: User must have app installed on her phone.

> You must use RedLaser to scan the QR code - it is the only that pushes URLs out to Safari

I believe both Zbar and Zxing do that.

Is there any websites where I can find more good use cases of QR codes ?

A good use case, indeed. Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com