barcodes

Label Flow helps create labels with its instinctive program. By providing a well-planned layout and a seemingly endless supply of labels, this program will meet shipping needs.

We jumped immediately into the program thanks to its intuitive wizard, which makes the interface a breeze to deal with. The strongest aspect of the wizard was its selection of labels. We were impressed that every brand from Avery to Wal-Mart was represented and couldn't imagine a brand name or label type not included. We eased through the entry fields for standard label additions like addresses and names, but were pleasantly surprised … Read more

Label Spirit Professional offers to help design custom labels for any purpose. With a simple layout and a fantastic level of control, this is a great program to meet shipping needs.

We were struck by how much this program's interface looked like a boring graphic design program with its menus of design options, but immediately felt at home while working through its helpful wizard. We surfed through the program's list of labels and were pleased to find practically every brand and style imaginable. The word-processing tool to input addresses was nothing outstanding, but very functional. The program really … Read more

Label Spirit Simple is a powerful label maker that allows users to create labels with text, images, bar codes, and more. Although the program is a bit confusing at first, the program offers many options for label creation.

The program's interface is not particularly intuitive. The program is separated into two components--Label Edit and Label Print--and it is not readily apparent what either of these does. The Print interface in particular is confusing, with lots of little unfamiliar things crowded into the top of the screen. This is unfortunate, because the interface is otherwise quite sleek, and the look … Read more

If you're thinking of getting Sprint's Samsung Exclaim, the phone now comes with another cool function.

Scanbuy, the company that's been at work putting its ScanLife application on camera cell phones, announced Tuesday that its ScanLife 2D bar code reader application will now be preloaded on the Samsung Exclaim from Sprint.

This is the first wireless phone to be shipped in the U.S. with the ScanLife technology. The company expects additional models will ship with the application in the future.

ScanLife is an application that allows you to scan a 2D bar code with a standard … Read more

Barcoding inventory, patient charts, customer files, and more is easy as pie with this handy app. Using it with Excel files for multiple items, or simply creating single barcodes is as simple as printing labels from your own printer.

Universal Barcode Maker launches a drab but very functional interface. Although it displays a number of fields, drop-down menus and radio buttons, the items are cleverly arranged in categories according to the steps to follow in creating barcodes, so understanding how to use the app requires only a minute or so. This neat little app performed nicely in our tests, responding … Read more

The official Google Books blog has a fun post on how to scan your books into the service's "My Books" feature by using a USB barcode scanner. The My Books section of Google Books is similar to the popular Mac application Delicious Library in letting you keep a list of all your titles in a digital card catalog that can be shared with others. Of course you can do this without the USB barcode scanner simply by searching for the book, but Google's Matt Cutts makes it look like fun:

As Cutts mentions in the video, … Read more

After preloading an iPhone app on Sansumg camera phones and expanding to Mexico, Scanbuy announced Tuesday that its ScanLife multi-bar code reader is now compatible for mobile phones running on Google Android.

As in any other mobile device, the ScanLife application allows for scanning a 2D bar code and automatically performing an action or function associated with that code. The action can be displaying a specific Web site, launching a video, dialing a phone number, or anything else a smartphone can do.

This way, bar codes can help eliminate the need to use the phone's tiny keyboard. You can … Read more

ShopSavvy, Barcode Scanner (by the ZXing team), and CompareEverywhere (an Android Challenge winner) are three free shopping applications for Google Android poised to help you find the best deals in town and online.

At their core, they're nearly identical, using the phone's camera to auto-focus on a barcode. That barcode is then matched to a product using an open source decoding library, ZXing, that was developed by Google engineers last year. (You can also search by product name.)

While these shopping apps share a back end, the front ends are distinct. Unfortunately, they all produced varying results that … Read more