Kevin Hoyt

Let me be clear right up front - I didn’t come up with this idea. In fact, I’ve seen no fewer than three other web-cam barcode scanner implementations. This first one I saw was shortly after the release of Flash Player 8 with the introduction of the bitmap API’s. You can still use this version and access it as a component on Barcodepedia. Renaun Ericsson has also created a web-cam barcode scanner using ActionScript 3 complete with a Flex 2 user interface. I also ran across an implementation on the webqem blog.
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After encountering a security sandbox limitation in my previous example, I update the post with a scaled-down set of images that are accessed from the same domain. I’ll say more on that topic later. Then I got a comment from Brian Ferris saying that he was confused by my post as it was contradictory to the documentation. Brian quoted the documentation which has the following to say about context menus.
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One of the first tips I give to Flash developers getting into Flex for the first time is to forget what they know about Flash. I was helping a customer with a proof of concept application the other day, and got bit by not following my own advice when the requirement to have context menus came up. This feature has been available since Flash Player 7, but I wasn’t familiar with how to implement it on Flash Player 9 with Flex 2. After burning several hours trying it the Flash 7 way, I landed at the Flash 9 way.
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Image processing algorithms have long been one of my favorite areas of study. It’s the genesis for a number of my Central examples (i.e. EXIF data and hex editor), so you can only imagine that I’m super-excited about Apollo. Of course manipulating bitmap data has been possible in ActionScript since Flash Player 8, and has only gotten better (due to performance) in Flash Player 9. Taking this to the extreme (perhaps) is Fauxto.
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