Scandit announces partnership with cloud-based mobile development platform Application Craft

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Scandit announces partnership with cloud-based mobile development platform Application Craft

Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with Application Craft.  Application Craft makes mobile, tablet and desktop app development easy with its 100% cloud-based mobile development platform. Using Application Craft developers can create their apps once, and deploy them easily on the web and native platforms including  iOS and Android.

The new partnership comes alongside the announcement of our all-new free community edition, featuring access to our Product API with over 25 million product UPC mappings. With our new product release and our partnership with Application Craft, incorporating our barcode scanner into your app is simpler than it’s ever been.

Application Craft is so awesome that they’ve created a tutorial detailing how you can add our Scanner into your app using their platform! Check out how easy it is:
*this tutorial information provided by Application Craft on their site.

Here is a tutorial to integrate the Scandit widget into your application, step-by-step:

1. Drag the Scandit widget onto the page

Having created a new App in the Application Craft Console,  you enter IDE and locate the Scandit Widget in the Toolbox in the left pane. One minute later you have your UI ready.
Drag toolbox widgets onto the page to create a simple app. Notice the Scandit widget in the Toolbox pane on the left.
The Scandit widget displays as a button but if you want to trigger a scan other than from a button press you can just make a one line API call.

2. Set the widget’s properties

Next, we select the widget and look across to the Property Bar on the right hand side. Here we can customize all important properties such as:

  • -your Scandit App Key
  • -the text strings that appear to the user when scanning
  • -colors of target boxes
  • -whether the phone beeps or vibrates after a successful scan
  • -whether to allow regular 1D codes (normal barcodes) and/or 2D barcodes (QR and other codes)

The Scandit widget’s properties are shown on the right hand side.

3. Customize your AC Events

The last step in the setup process is to customize the 2 Application Craft Events provided by the Scandit widget

  • -onSuccess – a barcode was successfully read and you are passed the type of barcode as parameter 1 and the actual barcode value in parameter 2; you would normally then display this value in a field elsewhere in your App.
  • -onFail – usually called when the user presses ‘Cancel’ in the scanning window

The Scandit Widget’s events are shown in the right pane. Notice onSuccess and onFail at the bottom.
Here we can see how we have simply configured the onSuccess event to write the scanned code into the two text fields in our App.

4. Build your App

With most Application Craft Apps, you can now simply run your App directly from the IDE. However, because the Scandit component is a binary component that is not part of HTML5, we need to build a Phonegap/Cordova App. Application Craft supports Phonegap/Cordova fully, allowing all Phonegap properties to be customized if you want.

The Phonegap properties within the AC IDE. You don’t have to set anything, but this gives you complete control if you want it.
IMPORTANT : Currently the one-click build process for the Scandit plugin (as shown in the above video) is not publicy available. It will be available in early October 2012. In the meantime, the AC plugin is available for use by anyone who is happy to build Phonegap/Cordova apps using XCode or Java.

From October, 2012, all you will need to do go to the AC Console and then press the ‘Phonegap’ button. At this point your App is automatically compiled and you get back iOS and Android binaries ready to deploy. You can upload your codesigning keys into the AC Console so you can build Development, Ad-Hoc, Enterprise and App Store builds with a single button click.

Phonegap/Cordova apps can be built with a single click without the need for manual compilation. From October 2012 we are adding support for Phonegap/Cordova plugins, too.

Get started today by signing up for Application Craft and the all-new Scandit community edition!