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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

I've been writing about (and using) QR codes for a couple of decades. I love the innovation that happens within the bounds of the specification.

One problem that I foresee with this is that they don't look like QR codes. People are now used to looking for a specific monochrome pattern to point their phone towards.

There was a competitor to QR - MS Tag - which tried something similar. Their codes were able to be integrated into designs without the "ugliness" of QR codes. The problem is, no one knew they were there!

See https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2010/11/ms-tags-vs-qr-codes/#not-as...

The corner targets are still visible in Nitro's codes - so hopefully people will spot them. But I think it is OK to embrace the ugly. Not everything needs to be smothered in your corporate branding. Something which is standardised across multiple things is useful.

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The irony is you can scan a URL with a phone camera and it's clickable, with the nice side-effect that the domain is human-inspectable. Just make the font a little bigger and it scans easily.

QR codes are fascinating though, as they can encode more than mere URLs. But the vast majority in the consumer space are links. For that purpose, I'm rooting for OCR.

it’s gotten to the point where I’ll find myself screenshotting text and using ocr to grab links because sometimes apps disable highlighting text for whatever reason.

Agree with a lot here. QR Codes have however become a cornerstone of digital convenience in a lot of the world. All the more true here in India, where basically everything is using QR Codes, from payments to restaurant menus. People here are still not used to using Lens + OCR. Then, there are issues like long links or confusing zeroes and O's. QR Codes solve these pretty well, I believe.

A big advantage of QR code is that it's just a square, whereas URLs occupy short, wide rectangles of space. They are also robust to a number of situations where OCR may struggle: small size, low light, fading...

And they are human-inspectable. It is regrettable that iOS's camera app just prompts you to open a QR-encoded URL in a Web browser, but you can use a "passive" scanner that just reveals the payload without risk.

The classic Russ Cox QArt code doesn't suffer from this. [0]

[0] https://research.swtch.com/qart

The innovation here mostly seems to be shrinking the QR code dots and putting them over a background image? Frankly, these look pretty terrible.

There's ones that look really bad, and others that look like they were just supposed to be. Here's one of my favourites: https://x.com/bhasinanant/status/1956313568665571431

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