Zer0

Firstly a bit of background. I have a BEng in Software Engineering and have been programming in Java for about seven and a half years (although it took me about three years to really get my head around it). One of the most exciting and most challenging aspects of software engineering is new technologies emerging and trying to keep up with them. My first dive into Android development was in the final year of my degree. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do for my final year project but wanted to do something that was interesting and cutting-edge, which is what app development was a couple of years ago. I decided to try my hand at Android app development and implement a music streaming app. Although I got a good grade for my final year project, mainly due to writing a good thesis, my app wasn't particularly impressive. Come to think of it, it was quite shit in retrospect.

After playing around with Android development on and off I decided to give it a real shot a few months back and see what I could do, before the boat leaves and I get left behind. One thing I'm useless at is coming up with app ideas of my own. However one night my friend gave me a great idea that seemed doable. He is an avid film buff and DVD collector and must have hundreds and hundreds of DVDs. He was telling me that sometimes he ends up buying duplicates because he couldn't remember whether he had a particular film or not. He also told me that he could not find an Android app that could tell him if he already had a particular DVD or not. This gave me the idea of a camera barcode scanning application that could save what products you already had, such as DVDs or CDs and when you go to scan them again the app will tell you that you already have it.

Of course when we formulated that idea we were actually out drinking, so I didn't quite think it through. I designed and built the app and begun testing it by scanning some CDs with my Samsung smartphone and entering the information about them manually. When I got to the tenth CD I had a sudden realisation. If a person has hundreds of CDs or DVDs or whatever, they are going to hate entering all this information manually and they are going to hate this app with a passion. Then I got the idea of automatically downloading the details about the products by getting the app to do a Google search for the barcode and retrieve back whatever information is found. You can even go to web pages to view more information about a particular product. At the moment this solution is not perfect but it will do until I find a better solution. I also realised that the app could be used for scanning QR codes as well as barcodes so that was an added bonus.

I built the app on top of an open-source barcode scanning library called Zxing (pronounced "Zebra Crossing") and implemented all the necessary functionality. At the moment the app doesn't look visually impressive, mainly because I don't have a degree in graphic design or anything like that, but that's another area I want to improve on. I like to think that the appearance is 'minimal' like a barcode itself. Not quite sure if I could get this into the Google Play store as there's probably still plenty of glitches and stuff but I could always dream. Also, one guy with his laptop creating apps for fun competing for downloads against apps made by established companies is a bit of an uneven match.

Here's a few screenshots. 'BChecker' is only a working title by the way. Also I was testing it with a can of Lynx deodorant here just in case you were wondering what the hell.

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