hey, this is wonderful. it would be great if street painters adopted this to communicate with their audience. i would love to go into a tunnels with cool street paintings and scan these signs and get access to playlists, videos and messages that the painter wants us to visit. these cool triangles could become symbols of an underground movement if promoted in these communities.
Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative
51–60 of 140 posts
Re: Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative
#52Unfortunately, and unlike a QR code, the data is not encoded in the drawing itself, which means an Internet connection is always needed. For URL sharing the Internet connection requirement is not so much of a problem (you'd always need that connection for browsing to the URL, unless it's a local or data URL), for everything else it may be. Also, once the Meshtag service goes down or closes for good, all tags become i…
> Unfortunately, and unlike a QR code, the data is not encoded in the drawing itself. Obviously, there is data in the drawing. Just that data is a symbol which is resolved through some proprietary app, which maintains the association in a private database where it is subject to expiry and such. Just some third party has to develop an independent app to open up access to the data in the drawing and use it outside of t…
> Obviously, there is data in the drawing.
I know this, and one can think of it as the numbers encoded in a plain old EAN-13 barcode. But as with these barcodes, the numbers by themselves don't usually have any meaning, they are just the key of a key-value pair. In this case the key-value database is in the Meshtag servers.
Like you said, the "raw numbers" can still be useful for small-scale labeling, but once you are at the point where you're just using the drawing to record a simple ID, it may be just easier to write the ID alphanumerically and have the computer OCR it or even just type it by hand (with a checksum digit, this can be more practical and effective than having to deal with camera scanners - "oh where is that app again/where did I leave my phone again...").
Re: Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative
#53As many have already discussed that this is akin to a URL shortener, and not stand alone (like QR is ), I have a different question. Your app has in-app-purchases. Please provide examples how you are monetizing this? Also, I notice you use a G+ identity to tie all codes to, yet your pictures shows "Anonymous" as creator. Is that really anonymous, or fakenonymous?
As for monetization, I figured why the hell not. If somebody really wants to buy a simple meshtag that they can memorize and reuse (maybe it has their contact info), I'm not gonna stop them :). This isn't really a moneymaking scheme, this is a side project and my first Android/iOS app. As for anonymity, it's anonymous to other users. If you deselect the anonymous checkbox when editing the tag, other users will see yo…
Please don't think I'm criticizing on your choice of monetization. Making money to continue doing what you like is a pretty big cornerstone here at HN :)
I was more curious what you were charging for.
Also, you're being discussed over on https://www.reddit.com/r/occult/comments/3esa6n/drawable_alt...
You really hit it with triangles / sigils and the occult. Perhaps a pivot? Too small a market?
Re: Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative
#54> No. Unlike QR codes, meshtags of any color on any background can be scanned. There just needs to be enough contrast between the meshtag and its background, and the background must be a solid color. qr codes can be any color, just need to have enough contrast, also depending on the redundancy level of it you can actually omit a significant fraction of the qr code and still have it scan
You can take it up to 11 like this: http://files.rya.nc/qr.png
QR Codes can actually get pretty colourful and unique -
Re: Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative
#55I think it's a mix of QR code plus Microsoft Tag. Tag suffers from the problem of requiring an internet connection but they do provide stats on how many people scanned the tag.
Re: Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative
#56Sam, Cool stuff. I get what you're doing here, but from these comments I think QR code reference really throws people off. While comparing to QR might explain how it works, I would do my best to position this as nothing like QR codes (and highlight use cases that make it unique from QR) to avoid the comparison.
Re: Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative
#57This is really clever, and solves a lot of the problems with QR codes. Not just the hand-drawable-ness, these also look a lot better aesthetically.
It adds one huge problem -- there is no central authority I need to rely on for QR codes. My QR codes can't get sold out from under me to someone with more money, as these can.
That's the same disadvantage with a URL. If you just wrote "whatever.com" the main problem is that you probably don't want to go to whatever.com, but some child page. But the main reason the child page isn't it's own site (like "whatever-child.com") is because you'd have to buy a new domain or go through some registration mechanism to make it act like that.
But if you're willing to pay and register, why wouldn't you just write the URL of the site you paid for and registered? Not only is it writable, but it's human readable and type-able, too...
So the big advantage is that it's probably cheaper, (and maybe splashy and fun.) And unless these get popular, nobody is going to know what it is, so you have to write "Go to www.meshtag.com and download meshtag so that you can see our message!" Which is a bit like hiding your product in someone else's store.
(But that's probably why I'm an unimaginative cynical clod.)
Re: Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can take it up to 11 like this: http://files.rya.nc/qr.png
I don't see anything on your blog about how that QR code can possibly work (I just scanned it, it does work, but my eyes tell me that's impossible) You have any background on how that QR was constructed?
The very short explanation:
* Split source image into red, green, and blue channels
* Run through the halftone qr generator[0]
* Recombine resulting QR codes into an RGB image
* Average combined QR codes with the source image
I'll probably post an article walking through the process using imagemagick some time next in August.
0. http://vecg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/Projects/SmartGeometry/halftone_QR/...
Re: Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative
#59Does it bother anyone else that the screenshot shows an hexagon that doesn't match the angle of the triangles?
Re: Show HN: A Hand-Drawn QR Code Alternative
#60As a tag system, this doesn't seem to have any advantages compared to QR codes, and it has several disadvantages (central authority, possible conflict, only encodes the key rather than the direct value).
However, this system does have an advantage for other purposes: those where the ability to reproduce it from memory is important. QR codes aren't memorizable; meshtags seem more so. Consider how many people prefer Android swipe-unlock patterns rather than PINs or passwords. Many people have good spatial memories, much more so than their memory for arbitrary strings. You could use this in cases where the property of being able to reproduce this from memory is important. Figure out how many bits of entropy this can represent, create and document a perfect 1:1 mapping between meshtags and an encoding, and target use cases QR codes can't handle.
For that matter, how robust is this against minor errors, and how high-resolution can you make it and still reliably resolve it? Can you pack this more densely than a QR code and still reliably read it? If so, you've got something particularly interesting.