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It's a confusing solution for a problem that does not exist, which is how to use a pen to draw readable shapes, a problem many of us learned how to solve in elementary school.[0] [0] http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/lette...
I mean this honestly. Do people actually even use QR codes? Filling up your phone with a bunch of hi-res pictures of bar codes, not to mention having to load: 1. QR code app 2. camera app 3. browser app These things are 100% in the gimmick column in my life.
1: http://oceans.taraexpeditions.org/m/qui-est-tara/les-expedit...
Damn, whole lot of hate in these comments. Chill out guys, nobody's trying to kill QR codes here. samfpetersen, you made a cool thing. Expiration of small tags is an interesting way to solve the landgrab problem. I think these would be fun to use and I hope I see some around.
I mean this honestly. Do people actually even use QR codes? Filling up your phone with a bunch of hi-res pictures of bar codes, not to mention having to load: 1. QR code app 2. camera app 3. browser app These things are 100% in the gimmick column in my life.
No need to store the hi-res pictures of bar codes; no need to load up camera ap, as that's handled by the QR code app; no need to load up the browser, since a small embedded one appears to open the link, as a rule.
That said, yeah, it's 100% a gimmick. I have only seen one or two problems for which QR codes really made sense, and none of them included scanning a URL with your phone.
Where Meshtag fits in is that it's aimed at users and not companies. I think a large reason most people don't scan QR codes is because they assume they're just trying to sell you something. But if you saw a meshtag that somebody drew on a wall somewhere, wouldn't you be curious?
Also, thanks for all the feedback! I have dreamed of being on hacker news since I started coming here. Any UI/UX designers in the Boston area, hit me up if you want to get involved!
1. Pick any random number, say 1234. This is your identifier.
2. Register this identifier and your URL at SuperNumericShortener.com
3. Write "SNS-1234" anywhere you want.
4. Install a fancy smartphone app that can take a picture of a writing and recognize "SNS-1234".
5. The app opens your browser to http://SuperNumericShortener.com/1234 which redirects to whatever URL you chose.
That's it. Oh and you can pay to reserve short identifiers (since they are likely to be claimed by other users of the service).
And for some reason meshtags use triangular shapes instead of numbers. Maybe it makes the concept look fancier than what it really is. Or maybe the author thought it would be easier to recognize a meshtag than detecting the shape "SNS" and do OCR to extract the following identifier? Either way, "SNS-1234" is easier to memorize, faster to draw, can be communicated in writing and speech. All advantages that meshtags lack.
Edit: here is something I would really want: in my Android Chrome address bar, next to the microphone icon, I want a camera icon that lets me snap a picture of a written URL, and opens it directly. No obscure QR code, meshtag, or whatever.
This could be useful for dead-drop style communications. Should be easier for two people to memorize how to draw a reasonably complex shape than an arbitrary string of bits, numbers, or letters. If you can do that there's no risk of leaking the drop location: just draw it, scan it to check the drop, then destroy the drawing.
Unfortunately, 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…
Very true. And I steered away from squares due to the "swastika effect". Also because the information is slightly more dense with a system based on triangles - 6 bits at a given vertex versus 4 bits.
I agree that triangles look a lot better than squares (to the point that the "swastika effect" is indeed a problem, even though the drawings are generated by a human, and not randomly.) However, they are also very hard to draw properly.
To recover the QR code decentralization, have you tried to encode data inside your triangular grid? You would loose the "drawable" property (due to the size), but the result would still look more interesting than the pixel junk of QR codes (and you could enforce "connectivity" for aesthetic and error correction.)