I built a home-grown scanner like this one (not with ZBar though) for my asset tracking web app (www.assetbots.com) and agree that for 1D barcodes a cheap bluetooth or USB scanner is hard to beat.
We support both (camera and external), but surprisingly a lot of our customers find the camera good enough. Code 128 is our second-most scanned symbology behind QR.
I launched Assetbots (https://www.assetbots.com/) last year and went through a lot of ups and downs transitioning into the "people give me money" phase of the SaaS journey.
This year I plan to go all-in on scaling customer acquisition and getting the business out of infancy and into the next level of growth.
I never realized just how bad this can be until I started selling/marketing my startup. I was so confused by the reaction to my participation on a few subreddits where my target customers hang out - I had never experienced anything like it before.
I started to see patterns (not only against my posts personally, although I quickly stopped trying to participate) because I began to understand the market players. It's unreal how inauthentic most of the content actually is and how much of it is straight up shill marketing. I suspect this is true for a large number of niche forums where specific products or services become "blessed" by the community.
The only way to accomplish this is with either a large network of puppet accounts or with the support of the moderators. Probably both.
I've been a Replicache user since v7 when it was distributed as wasm - it's now v10 for General Availability. My use case is quite a bit different than this demo - I'm making a bog-standard back office SaaS with it [0]. It's been great though. Very productive and the end result feels very fast.
I'm also working on a similar product, but targeted toward small businesses (https://assetbots.com/). I agree that the simplicity is nice here. I've done a lot of customer interviews and demos at this point, so here's my free advice:
- Custom fields are a must.
- An IRL link (an "asset tag") is nice, but honestly not critical, even for most small businesses. This changes as users become more accustomed to having an inventory.
- Users say they want hierarchies but they almost never do in practice (e.g., nested folders or containers).
I'd love to chat inventory product design any time. Feel free to email me (my email is in my profile). Good luck!
This is really cool! I'm working on an asset tracking application right now (https://www.assetbots.com/), and generating labels are a big part of the workflow. My roadmap calls for simply generating Avery sheets.
But it would be AWESOME if I could let a user click a button and send them to a labellive:// URL and have it just work. I'll explore a little and see if there's a mom-tested way to make this usable.
We support both (camera and external), but surprisingly a lot of our customers find the camera good enough. Code 128 is our second-most scanned symbology behind QR.