Anyone Up For Writing A New Native Sailfish App?

Applications
#1

I am not a developer so this task is beyond me. I therefore wondered if anyone else might be interested.

The app in question would essentially be like the IOS/Android Stocard app (yes I know I can run this on Sailfish anyway … but its android and has loads of ads in it, etc) in that the idea is that it stores details of membership cards, store cards, etc so that you don’t have to carry all of them around with you all the time.

Storing details of a new card would include:

  1. Giving the new card a title in a locally stored card database
  2. Capturing and storing images from the camera of the front and the back of the card
  3. Capturing and storing any bar code or QR code on the card using the camera
  4. Capturing any text on the card - name, membership number, expiry date, etc

Displaying a card entry from the database would show:

  1. Card title and text details
  2. The QR or bar code (not just the image taken by the camera but a ‘proper’ rendering of the code in a standard size so that it could be scanned by a handheld reader
  3. The picture of the front of the card cropped to a standard size and, on selection, the back

This app would not be suitable for bank or credit cards so would not need any added security, etc.

Anyone out there fancy having a go?

1 Like
There is NO way this update was tested. Nothing hardly works
#2

Isn’t this > BarWal | OpenRepos.net — Community Repository System what you are looking for?

2 Likes
#3

Its a good start, and I did look at this app, but it only stores bar codes. Often cards, especially membership cards, don’t have bar or QR codes - you just need to show the card itself - hence the front and rear picture requirements. Also the Barwal app is quite limited in the text fields - only a description is provided for. I was looking for something more general such as a Sailfish version of Stocard which could cope with all sorts of cards, not just storing a bar code.

#4

Do you know what kind of a task you are asking for? Developing and finetuning this kind of an application will cost more than a few fulltime weeks of work.

#5

Of course I know that developing an app for any system is a non-trivial undertaking - I used to be an app developer for security hardened UNIX systems for the UK Government in the late 1980’s.

Please try not to be so condescending when you reply to posts and consider that there may other contributors on this forum who may have a level of knowledge and experience equal, or even heaven forbid, superior to your own - even if it is not directly related to Sailfish. There are a lot of people here with a very wide range of systems development knowledge and experience as well as those who are more concerned with user experience. Respect is the key.

That being said, there are those who enjoy app development for Sailfish as a sideline to their day-jobs and do it for the challenge and enjoyment of contributing to the Sailfish community - and it is really those people who I am asking the question of. There is no harm in this.

If nobody wants to develop an app in this area then fine, there is nothing lost. But if somebody is interested because such an app would meet both their interests in developing it, and those of any interested users in using it then that would be a win-win would it not?

1 Like
#6

The comment I made was not meant to be condescending, but just as an inquiry of your knowledge. I guess it could easily be received the wrong way, I translated from my native tongue without reading afterwards. I am sorry for any possible harm (not the right word) I may have caused by failing to re-read my post. You were asking for a specific level of fine-tuning (OCR, automatic photo editing etc) which is quite difficult to create in one’s spare time.

Perhaps you could apply a few feature-requests via the issue-tracker for BarWal in github? I think the app can be improved on, and if I have spare time left I might help a bit (I’d like an integrated scanner instead of the CodeScanner app).

1 Like
#7

Apology accepted and no harm done. I’m not really sure I’m up to getting into github or any other development tools. These days I’m just a phone user looking for native Sailfish solutions where I can. If these become available because somebody in the community wants to provide them then that’s really great; if not then I will continue to rely on Android apps for these things.

I do appreciate the complexity of these things but the difficulty for us Sailfish users is there is nowhere else to go but the community for new apps. Sadly Jolla themselves only really address the very minimum standard apps on a smartphone and, as far as I know there are no commercial developers out there either porting their existing IOS/Android apps to Sailfish or developing new ones specifically for Sailfish - which is really sad because when Sailfish actually works properly it is brilliant and, in my opinion, much more usable than the competition.

Part of this I think is the simplicity and elegance of Sailfish apps with only the essential features and functionality provided - they are not ‘over-developed’ and nor do they have so many functions and features that users just get confused and turned off.