Transferring URLs from Firefox to a Smartphone
Today, my friend Alex was trying to type in the URL for a webpage I had open on my PC into his Android phone. And I thought out loud that it would be a weekend project to write up a Firefox app to generate the QR Code of the URL for the current tab. Alex being Alex, he immediately created a bookmarklet in Firefox to generate the QR Code and then used that QR Code to browse to the webpage he was typing into his phone.
The bookmarklet is so handy, I decided to post it here (after some cleanup and modifications from Alex’s original version). So, here is the script for the URL QR code generator bookmarklet.
javascript:(function(){window.open("http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=8&d="+window.location)})() |
You can use any QR Code reading app on your phone to read the URL. I have an Android (T-Mo G1) and I use the free ‘Barcode Scanner’ app available in the Android Marketplace.
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This doesn’t work with all URLs. Adding escape(window.location) helps, but not quite all the way. The following seems to work with all locations:
javascript:void(window.open(“http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=8&d=”+escape(window.location).replace(/+/g,’%252B’)))