tl;dr: I wrote a Mac OS X Service which allows you to display the currently-selected text as an on-screen QR code. Buy it here for only £1.07.

It really annoys me when there’s some text on my computer that I need to be available immediately on my Android phone. Especially when that text is a phone number or a URL. Fortunately, OS X now has Services, which are scriptable actions that can be performed on GUI elements by right-clicking.

I opened up Automator and created the following:

Here’s a Gist for those who want the raw source code.

The service simply reads the selected text from stdin, generates a Google Image Chart URL for a QR code with that text, downloads it to a temporary local file and displays it via QuickLook (using the qlmanage CLI). It looks something like this:

When I’m done with it, I hit the space bar and it goes away.

If this is something that’d be useful to you, you can grab it here.