Showing posts with label qrcode. Show all posts
Showing posts with label qrcode. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

How to make vCard QR Codes that are compatible with iPhone, Android and Blackberry

I've been working on a web page where you can scan a company's vCard easily on your smartphone and have it saved to your contact list. It's definitely a pain in the ass. Here is a sample QR code with a vCard in it:



Here are some tips:
  • use the Image Chart Editor on Google Code - you have to look for the QR Code chart in the gallery. Basically, you send it a URL with the vCard in the querystring and it sends back a QR Code image. Don't forget to url-encode your querystring. 
  • You don't need to email a vCard to iPhone, it can read them directly from a QR Code with the right app.
  • I tried a few different QR Code readers for iPhone and most of them sucked at parsing vCards. The best that i found was Qrafter, and it's free.
  • I used Barcode Scanner on Android. 
  • Android didn't want to accept a URL, so I put it in the NOTE as well. Any tips?
  • With Blackberry 6, use AppWorld, hit the menu, then choose Scan a barcode. 
  • Blackberry can't read vCards directly from a QR Code, but you can qr-code a URL that returns a vCard. You'll want to send back this PHP header: header("Content-type:text/x-vcard");
Young, bored, and know Java? Please write a decent QR code reader for blackberry :)

Here is a vCard that I tested with Windows 7, Blackberry 6, iPhone 4 and Android 2.3.3