Keep in mind that this is specific research and should be balanced using your own site analytics (eg. Your site gets mostly Firefox traffic vs IE you can move towards certain features sooner).

http://www.longtailvideo.com/html5/

I did find that my favorite QR Scanner I use on my iPhone was one of the many that suffers from poor vCard support so data was getting put in the wrong fields. Once I tried QRafter (vCard support is good, but I’m still not sold on the rest of it) I was able to properly test the images.

Feel free to give it a try, right-click on the preferred image to save and post your comments or feedback here. I get the feeling I will be updating this to make it more useful.

My Dynamic QR Code Creator for vCards

Well, there is a quick and easy solution. Just add this to your functions.php file:

add_filter( 'widget_text', 'shortcode_unautop');
add_filter( 'widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

Source: using shortcodes everywhere

Simple. Now you’ll be able to use your cool shortcodes within text widgets.

However, using Google Calendar there doesn’t seem to be a way of turning off the automatic invite email that gets sent when you tell Siri to “Schedule a meeting with [person's name] on Monday at 10am”. If the the person is in your contacts with an email address they are added as an invitee and Google Calendar automatically emails them the invite. Of course, there are ways around this by changing what you tell Siri but that misses the point of the intuitive nature of Siri and impacts it’s usefulness.

I’ve had a few emails go out to unexpected invitees for tentative meetings I was just planning before contacting the client. I really wish Google would made the automatic sending of invite emails a setting based feature.

If you know of a fix, add-on or workaround that includes leaving the name of the person in the meeting request to Siri, please comment here. Of course, if I find anything on the web I’ll be sure to post it here too.

On your iPhone open safari browser and go to m.google.com/sync and login with your Google account. Select all the calendars that you want to sync. The default is to only sync the one calendar but from here you can select up to 25 calendars to sync.

It’s available via USB, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Sorry I doubted you, Virgin Mobile.

QR Codes are starting to gain a little ground in advertising, who am I kidding, they are popping up everywhere. One of the early adopters of this technology was Real Estate agents and like most implementations you have a broad mix of excellent use to useless. I’ve seen lawn sign with QR Codes in front of a home for sale that link me directly to the house details (photos, price, agent contact info) and location-aware functionality that shows me other homes the agent lists in the area. I’ve also seen the same kind of placement that send me to the agent’s website with no easy way to find details about the house I’m standing in front of. I have clients using them for newsletter signups at their retail counter, others with them on their front door to send after hours visitors to their website and some using them on all their print marketing to engage that “younger audience”. No matter what they are doing with them, it’s up to the viewer to have some way of using the QR Code.

Enter the smartphone. Just about everyone has one, be it iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Windows 7, but how many have a QR Code reader installed? Do you? If you don’t, you should. QR Codes aren’t just limited to sending you to a website, they can:

• Link to website (targeted content specific to what you are scanning the code for)
• Text (larger blocks of text information)
• Enter a Phone Number
• Send an Email
• Prepare a SMS Message
• Enter business card contact info using vCard
• Link to Google Maps for directions
• Paypal Buy Now
• Connect to Social Media (Facebook Like, Twitter Tweets, etc)
• Get music through iTunes link
• Show a Youtube video
• Connect to WIFI network for Android Devices

Pretty cool, huh?

Depending on your smartphone, here are some of the available QR Code scanners, most of which are free.

iPhone

Scan (Free) – this is one of my favorites so far (iTunes)
Qrafter (Free and Paid versions) – (iTunes)
Optiscan ($1.99) – (iTunes)

Android

ScanLife (Free)
Barcode Scanner (Free)
QuickMark (Free)
QR Pal (Free)

Blackberry

ScanLife (Free) – up until I switched to an iPhone recently, this is one I used on my Blackberry.
BeeTagg (Free)
QR Code Scanner Pro (Free)

Windows 7

Quickmark (Free)
BeeTagg (Free)
PhraseMeme

There are many, many more so make sure you read the comments in the app store and feel free to post your favorites here in the comments.

The sooner you get an app, the sooner you can start taking advantage of those funky codes and business owners and marketers will love you for it.

The Problem

As just about everyone knows the iPhone is incapable of playing any sort of Flash through the mobile Safari browser and generally speaking everyone has adapted and found work arounds or changed their sites accordingly as to not require Flash for certain things.

One of the most used plugins I have installed is the 1 Pixel Out flash MP3 player. And by the number of downloads and searches I’ve seen it’s one of the most popular ways to quickly play an mp3 inline to a blog post. It’s customizable, looks great and most of all it works perfect! That is until you try to view the post from your iPhone.

The Solution

So I hacked around the plugin and created the following patch that will detect if your viewer is using an iPhone, and if so it will serve the MP3 with a clickable “Play” image. This allows your viewer to play the mp3 straight through the iPhone! Your viewers will no longer get the no-flash error but instead get this:

Installation [version 2.0.4.1]

Just download this zip and go to your plugins folder for WordPress. Replace your audio-player.php file with the one provided and put the iphone_play.png image in the assets folder. That’s it!

Download

Please note that this is based on version 2.0.4.1. The older version I have ported are listed below.Also, I haven’t tested all the different methods so you may see an issue here or there. Just hit me up if you have a problem and I’ll try to fix it. I’m hoping that 1 Pixel Out will integrate this into the release officially at some point. BTW, The user agent detection function was borrowed from WPtouch.

For you folks that want to manually do it or see what has been changed just have a look below. In the audio-player.php file you will need to make the following changes:

ETA: added ipad as a user agent as per MartyW’s comment below (not in zip file).

Add the following to line 320:

		/**
		 * Detects if the user agent is an iPhone or iPod
		 * returns true or false
		 */
		function detectAppleMobile($query = '') {
			$container = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
				$useragents = array(
				"iphone",  				 // Apple iPhone
				"ipod", 					 // Apple iPod touch
				"ipad", 					 // Apple iPad
				"aspen", 				 // iPhone simulator
				"incognito", 			 // Other iPhone browser
				"webmate" 			 // Other iPhone browser
			);
			$applemobile = false;
			foreach ( $useragents as $useragent ) {
				if ( eregi( $useragent, $container ) || file_exists($devfile) ) {
					$applemobile = true;
				}
			}

			return $applemobile;
		}

after inserting that code around line 562 you will see:

			} else {
				// Not in a feed so return player widget
				$playerElementID = "audioplayer_" . ++$this->playerID;
				if (strlen($this->options["flashAlternate"]) > 0) {
					$playerCode = str_replace(array("%playerID%", "%downloadURL%"), array($playerElementID, $actualFile), $this->options["flashAlternate"]);
				} else {
					$playerCode = '<p class="audioplayer_container"><span style="display:block;padding:5px;border:1px solid #dddddd;background:#f8f8f8" id="' . $playerElementID . '">' . sprintf(__('Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version <a href="%s" title="Download Adobe Flash Player">here</a>. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.', $this->textDomain), 'http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&promoid=BIOW') . '</span></p>';
				}

				$this->footerCode .= 'AudioPlayer.embed("' . $playerElementID . '", ' . $this->php2js($playerOptions) . ');';
				$this->footerCode .= "\n";

				return $playerCode;
			}

which needs to be replaced with:

			} else {
				if($this->detectAppleMobile()){
					$iphone_player = '';

					foreach ( explode( ",", $source) as $afilename ) {
						$afilename = trim($afilename);
						$iphone_player .= '<a href="'.$afilename.'"><img src = "'.WP_CONTENT_URL.'/plugins/audio-player/assets/iphone_play.png"></a><br />';
					}
					return $iphone_player;
				} else {
					// Not in a feed so return player widget
					$playerElementID = "audioplayer_" . ++$this->playerID;
					if (strlen($this->options["flashAlternate"]) > 0) {
						$playerCode = str_replace(array("%playerID%", "%downloadURL%"), array($playerElementID, $actualFile), $this->options["flashAlternate"]);
					} else {
						$playerCode = '<p class="audioplayer_container"><span style="display:block;padding:5px;border:1px solid #dddddd;background:#f8f8f8" id="' . $playerElementID . '">' . sprintf(__('Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version <a href="%s" title="Download Adobe Flash Player">here</a>. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.', $this->textDomain), 'http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash&promoid=BIOW') . '</span></p>';
					}

					$this->footerCode .= 'AudioPlayer.embed("' . $playerElementID . '", ' . $this->php2js($playerOptions) . ');';
					$this->footerCode .= "\n";

					return $playerCode;
				}
			}

Installation [version 2.0 beta 6]

Just download this zip and go to your plugins folder for WordPress. Replace your audio-player.php file with the one provided and put the iphone_play.png image in the assets folder.

Download

Now head on back to my update post to see how to take this one step further and get HTML5 into the mix. – David