Taking A Shot With Shotcode

After writing about Semacode and getting it working - special thanks to Stan - Dennis suggested I look at Shotcode. Fair enough. He'd already done the legwork on this one, creating the image and so forth. All I had to do was download the Shotcode application, which I did directly on my GPRS enabled Nokia 6620 phone, and presto magico - it installed.

So now came the fun part - using it. Again, I cheated here - Dennis already had provided the Shotcode, which is at the top right of this entry. In running the application the first time, it explained with images about the viewing distance (which was my stumbling block with Semacode. I sat here with my camera and tried to shoot the image.

My phone wouldn't let me. It sat there in camera mode, and did not allow me to take a snap. Odd. Frustrating. I fiddled with the phone, thinking it was at fault somehow. Nope. I tried again. Nope. And just as I was about to give up and report a bug, I caught a glimpse of red crosshairs. 'What the?'

Moving the camera back and forth, I found the crosshairs again. They blinked. Aha! Without someone whispering the windage in my ear, the phone instructed me to 'click to connect' I took the shot.

The crosshair idea is a pretty good one - if I knew about it. Fortunately, I bumbled into it - and since I'm on my first cup of coffee still, it's possible I screwed up somehow and didn't catch references to that.

Personally, I find the Shotcode images a little more visually appealing yet more eye catching than Semacode. The instructions are better than Semacode on the phone, but in fairness I usually don't read the instructions and bumble my way through things. Would I compare the two? Not really, except I think that both can learn from each other. For example, the viewing distance issue for Semacode is mentioned on the phone for Shotcode... and oddly, I still learned it the hard way with the crosshairs which I didn't know about.

Then, the Semacode sites are a bit more friendly when it comes to viewing on a mobile phone. It took me a while to navigate to my particular phone on the Shotcode site to download the application - and maybe someone less tenacious would have given up. Mobile phone browsing is fairly new to me, but I'm a fairly quick study. Of course, I've only used a Nokia 6620 and it's browser on a network which is still being built.

Either way, both applications are really cool, but for practical use as an individual, I'm not so sure. Business applications are abundant, and that Semacode has the Semapedia certainly gives it high marks in my book because I'm a Wikipedia advocate.

But what I do have to say, in the context of MobileActive and the Digital Divide: The future is mobile technology, and if you don't get with it you will be run over. If you had told me in 1984 that in 22 years I would be using a device that fit in my hand and had more memory and processing power than the old Vic-20, I would have dreamed about it but not really believed. Here we are. I'm using that 'imaginary device' to navigate a network that I never even thought of - the internet.

If anything, both Semacode and Shotcode (and similar applications) are inspiring, and I'm a bit jealous of both when it comes to having thought of and done it. The uses for education, medicine, business - even government - are staggering. It's the modern age of symbology, and here we are at the brink staring down the abyss of possibility once again. I've been advocating the use of mobile technology on the DigitalDivide.net lists, but I hadn't realize just how far we had come already.

Which will I use? Both, probably. Which will I recommend to my clients for things that I'm still dreaming up? I don't know. I can't tell you. My general rule is 'imagine first the castle in the sky, then build the staircase'. And all these applications make for a much more interesting castle. When you're imagining, you don't toss things out - some things just fade and are called upon when needed.

Thanks to the people who made Shotcode possible, and the same with Semacode. I really do wish someone would do it in a more Free Software/Open Source fashion, and maybe someone has... but in testing these things, I can see that a lot of time and money went into developing both.

Imagine. Take a look at them, and think of the future. It's here, and it's a modern symbology... at least for now. Maybe the Egyptians had mobile phones for their hieroglyphics...

And now, I have to humbly catch up with this cool stuff. :-)