That Funny Looking Black-and-White Box
April 5, 2011 at 5:24 pm Stephanie Huang 1 comment
You may have noticed a little black-and-white box in the top right corner of your printed Illustrations. This box is a two-dimensional barcode called a QR code.
The QR code for every printed Illustration from Cytobank encodes:
- Name of Experiment
- Name of Illustration
- Link to Illustration (print view)
This information is visible when you use your mouse pointer to hover over the QR code in the online print view of an Illustration.
The QR code provides a quick and easy way to pull up an Illustration from its printed copy. For example, if you have a printout of your plots pasted in your lab notebook, you can scan the QR code and pull up the link to the Illustration.
To scan or read the QR code, you will need a camera-enabled smart phone or an iPad 2. You may need to install an app that enables the phone or iPad to scan the QR code.
Note that if you’ve printed your Working Illustration, the link encoded in the QR code will pull up your current Working Illustration. If you’ve made any changes after printing, then your Working Illustration will be different from what you see in your printed copy. It’s usually better to save your Illustrations and print from a Saved Illustration – that way the link encoded in the QR code will pull up the same Saved Illustration.
Try out the QR code in this blog post or on your own Illustrations. And as always, let us know if you have any questions or comments.
- Stephanie
Entry filed under: Cytobank. Tags: camera, illustration, iPad, QR code.
1.
How to Justify an iPad in Your Grant « Cytobank – As the cell flows | April 9, 2011 at 11:07 am
[...] The iPad with Cytobank provides a great alternative to paper printouts for showing your data plots at small group meetings. You can zoom in to see more detail or zoom out to see everything at once. For easy access to one or more Illustrations, you can bookmark experiments or Illustrations in your browser. If you have an iPad 2, you can also load an Illustration by using the camera to scan the QR code printed in the corner of all saved Cytobank Illustrations. (See our recent blog post on QR codes.) [...]