Show the QR code from any selected text on your Mac (Download)
How shall I send text/URLs from my Mac to my Mobile in a fast and confortable way?
The ShowQR utility gratfully solves that!
Once installed you can select any text from any application and with few mouse clicks the corresponding QR code containing that text will be promptly shown.
You can use this little service for free or if you like this tool you can leave a donation by clicking here

ShowQR service consists of two components, a simple python script that triggers Preview.app containing the generated QR code taken from the stadard input, while the second component consists of an automator script that setup the local or system-wide service.

The repository contains the ShowQR.pkg file that allows to install directly the utility into your Mac. Altough the package should work for any MacOS X version, it is possible that the showQR application will not work due to specific Mac OS architecture differencies. In this case, it is suggested to build the code from sources as reported in the build section. At the time of your reading the code supports MacOS BigSur. To compile your own showqr, your system must have:

. brew . XCode command line tools . python3 . pipenv (brew)

Once installed the utilty; select any text from any application and use one of the following:

• Go in the current app name menu and select: Services/ShowQR item
• Right click on top of selected text and select in the contextual menu: ShowQR. ShowQR generates a temporary file and triggers the Preview.app to show the generated QR code. The temporary file is already removed from the filesystem when it is displayed by the Preview application.

The build process requires the following steps

It is possible to use default MacOS python interpreter 2.7

ShowQR compile the python application using pyinstaller. The necessary commands to compile the source code are managed by the Makefile. Following rules are available:

$ make
Usage:
    make clean   - Cleanup project folder
    make showqr  - Generate the showqr application
    make test    - Test the showqr executable
    make install - Install ShowQR (brew)

The make install has been thought to integrate ShowQR in homebrew. In this case the ShowQR utility works only at user level. The installation made with the package will activate ShowQR for all users. This change can be easily modified changing the ShowQR.workflow destination path to /Library/Services/ inside the install Makefile rule.

The package project file showQRPackages.pkgproj, already contains the necessary configuration to create the ShowQR.pkg file, however in order to open this project file the Packages application must be installed first. Please also notice for MAC OS BisSur and later versions, it is necessart to give full trust to Package application executing: codesign --force --deep --sign - ~/Applications/Packages.app. Once opened the package project file using finder and clickin on its icon, just select the menu Build/Build. If everithing is fine, the new ShowQR.pkg file will be generated successfully and located under build directory.