Our reception has a barcode scanner plugged into a Macbook Mini, which is used by the receptionist. When people ‘check in’, they use the barcode scanner to scan their membership card, which then writes to a browser window.
If the receptionist has something else open, and therefore the relevant browser window is not the focus, then the input gets ignored.
So far, I have figured out that the input looks to OSX like a keyboard. My plan is to intercept the input from that ‘keyboard’ and use AppleScript to always send it to the same browser window.
I realise the whole thing can be improved – use a dedicated micro-device that just makes a CURL request using an API. However, for the moment, there is no API, no micro-device, and I need a solution ASAP.
So how do I intercept input from a specific keyboard? Or is there another quick solution?
I had to do something similar, on windows though. In my case the browser window usually was not open and I had to open it and browse somewhere specific with the barcode data.
I discovered that many barcode scanners can emulate a serial port even though they have a USB connection, including the one I had.
In most programming languages serial port data is very easy to read so the solution that I went with was a Java windows service that receives serial port scans and opens the appropriate URL when scanned. I posted some of the bare bones scan reader code here some time ago.
Anyway, you could see if your model can emulate serial port data and then you can capture it for your purposes, I think it would be better than a keyboard hook.