More and more school flyers are sent home with QR codes instead of clickable links lately. Since I usually read these flyers on my laptop (currently running Mac OS Sequoia) that introduces an annoying extra step. Frequently, I'll just pull out my phone, use the reader to open the link, and airdrop that back to my MacBook.

Today a new flyer came in while I didn’t have my phone with me. And rather than going over to the charger to find it, I stayed at my desk and started casting around for something already on my system that’d read QR codes. I really like CleanShot X for grabbing and annotating screenshots. It handles QR codes as well, but it’s hidden under a menu item named Capture Text (OCR). If Cleanshot lives in your menubar as well, choosing that and selecting the QR shows you the text of the link and offers to open it with your default browser.

Cleanshot Menu

This wouldn’t inspire a purchase if I didn’t already have it, but it’s a nice little touch on a thing I already use every day.