Linked List: October 26, 2015

Monday, 26 October 2015

Daring Fireball RSS Feed Sponsorship Openings ★

The DF RSS feed sponsorship schedule is almost sold out through the end of the year, but this week’s spot is now open. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to promote to DF’s audience, get in touch.

Chase Pay ★

Jason Del Rey, reporting for Recode:

Gordon Smith, Chase’s CEO of consumer and community banking, made the announcement at the Money20/20 payments conference in Las Vegas on Monday. In a video outlining the new product, Chase showed shoppers paying in stores by displaying a QR code to the cashier, not by tapping and paying through NFC technology like Apple Pay and Android Pay. The video also shows a diner paying at a restaurant by taking a photo of the bill.

Nothing involving QR codes has ever taken off. Good job wasting time on this, Chase.

Update: A few points in response to feedback:

QR codes are huge in China. Who cares? Chase isn’t a Chinese bank. Chase Pay is for the United States.
Starbucks has had great success with their code-scanner system. OK, that’s a good data point. Touché. I still say it stinks, though — and Apple Pay is coming soon.
Snapchat uses QR codes. Boarding passes for airlines and trains are usually QR codes. Not going to help Chase Pay. Boarding passes in particular: the QR code scanning is so flaky that most of the TSE checkpoints I’ve gone through recently require you to place your phone face down on their scanner.
When you pair your Apple Watch with your iPhone using the camera, that animation on the watch face is just a fancy equivalent of a QR code. Sure, I agree — but I’ve gone through that pairing process at least half a dozen times, with multiple watches and OS restores, and in my experience it can be so flaky that it doesn’t work.

I admit it was hyperbole to say that nothing involving QR codes has taken off — but I think it’s fair to say that nothing involving QR codes results in a good experience.

Studio Neat: Apple TV Remote Stand ★

Nice-looking stand for the new remote from Studio Neat:

The Apple TV Remote Stand is produced right here in Austin, TX. In Tom’s garage, to be precise. We are using an X-Carve CNC machine to mill the walnut. This is our first product we’ve produced entirely in house.

$12 cheap.

Kangaroo: $99 Pocket-Size Windows 10 PC ★

Emil Protoalinski, writing for VentureBeat:

The pitch is simple: Kangaroo offers the power of a cheap full-sized computer with the convenience and mobility of a cell phone. The black satin aluminum device is powered by an Intel Cherrytrail (Z8500) SOC, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (only about 18GB is free when you first start it, but storage is expandable via a microSD card), and an on-board battery (up to four hours of “casual use”). The standalone Kangaroo Dock, which you can swap out for other future docks, includes an HDMI port and two USB ports.

Cheap isn’t that interesting. Small isn’t that interesting. But really cheap and really small at the same time — that seems interesting to me.

‘Steve Jobs’ Bombs at Box Office ★

Variety:

After racking up the year’s best per-screen average in its opening weekend and doing strong business in limited expansion, Steve Jobs hit a stumbling block in its national release. It debuted to a measly $7.3 million, only a little more than the $6.7 million that Jobs, a critically derided film about the iPhone father with Ashton Kutcher, made in its initial weekend. Going into the weekend, some tracking suggested that the picture would do as much as $19 million.

So what went wrong?

There’s talk that word-of-mouth will help, but I think otherwise. It’s a movie about a man’s strained relationship with his daughter. That’s not what people should or do expect from a film titled Steve Jobs.

Facebook Engineering on Excessive Background Activity in Their iOS App ★

Ari Grant, iOS engineering manager for Facebook:

The second issue is with how we manage audio sessions. If you leave the Facebook app after watching a video, the audio session sometimes stays open as if the app was playing audio silently. This is similar to when you close a music app and want to keep listening to the music while you do other things, except in this case it was unintentional and nothing kept playing. The app isn’t actually doing anything while awake in the background, but it does use more battery simply by being awake. Our fixes will solve this audio issue and remove background audio completely.

The issues we have found are not caused by the optional Location History feature in the Facebook app or anything related to location. If you haven’t opted into this feature by setting Location Access to Always and enabling Location History inside the app, then we aren’t accessing your device’s location in the background. The issues described above don’t change this at all.

This is in response to widespread complaints that Facebook’s iPhone app was consuming inordinate battery life in the background — even when background updates were turned off. The suspicion was that Facebook was doing this deliberately, to work around iOS’s background processing restrictions. I’m curious to see how these bug fixes change things for Facebook users.

Update: Via Twitter, a few DF readers claim that the new version of the Facebook app still consumes a lot of energy in the background, even with background refresh disabled in Settings: General: Background App Refresh. Anyone else?

New Apple TV Orders Start Today ★

Free shipping for delivery November 2-4, $17 for delivery on Friday.