Technical Articles To Go

January 24, 2011

Quickly open tech articles and tip clip videos from the Diagnostic News website on your smart phone and take them anywhere; the bay, on the road, you name it.

Say you are a technician working on a tricky problem, and you just found an article or video on the newsblog with the info you need. Well, now you can easily take that article or video out to the car or on the road with you.

To start you need a smart phone capable of reading QR codes, or a quick response code. They are square barcodes that can be scanned by smartphone cameras to automatically pull up URLs, videos, photos, and more. Blackberry, iOS devices, and Android are all known to have excellent simple-to-use applications for this task.

If you’re unfamiliar with QR codes, read on for a crash course in how to get started.

  • Go to a post on the newsblog, such as this one.
  • Scroll to the bottom of the post content until you see the horizontal row of ‘sharing’ buttons (Facebook, Twitter, Email, Print).

  • Now click the one towards the center that looks like a QR code.
  • The next page that loads displays some information about the article and a large QR code.
  • Simply scan the code with your phone (or take a picture) then tell the app to open the url.
  • The article now opens in a mobile optimized version of the newsblog.

It’s that simple! This is a rapidly emerging technology around the world. QR codes are all around us and most of the time you may not even notice them—promotions in magazines, storefronts, products and more!

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