Scanning wallet cards into the iPhone

This is pretty much genius. Like Albert, I have a bunch of "membership cards" in my wallet -- they're those cards with a barcode or number on them that you get from places like the local grocery store, or some other retailer. They're useful to have around, but they tend to pile up after a while, and pretty soon, your wallet gets to be a brick of barcodes rather than anything you'd actually want to carry around in your pocket. Albert's solution was to scan all of his barcodes into the iPhone, front and back, as an iPhoto album. And lo and behold, just like the paperless boarding passes we posted about a while back, it worked. All of the barcodes were scannable, which means no more countless membership cards -- just a gallery in your iPhone.

We've already heard of barcodes reading both on and off of the iPhone, of course, and we'll hopefully see more of this when the SDK drops in just about a month here (maybe, in the future, someone will write an app to generate barcodes from numbers, so you don't even need to get a clear scan). But even without an external app, this is pretty handy solution to clearing up some of the clutter in your wallet. Obviously, for anything important (driver's license, credit cards), an iPhone scan won't do. But just to get the membership prices down at the Jewel-Osco, scanning wallet cards into an iPhone seems to work just fine. Very nice.

[via Waxy]
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