[Thali-talk] QR codes

[Yaron Goland]

Nexus - The good news is that the nexus now works! The bad news is that I'm an idiot! [1]

Samsung - It works now too!!!!!!!!

Furthermore the experience this time was definitely better! I managed to pair the phones while walking on my treadmill! And it happened really fast.
 
I want to complain about how small the data is you are moving but I realize that is just picking nits. If we just move say sha-256 hashes then using binary encoding that is only 32 bytes which would encode even smaller than the string you are currently moving around.

I think I'll send the demo to some of the folks we are working with and see if they are o.k. with it. I honestly and truly don't know what is easier for normal people to handle, QRCodes or Bluetooth. But let's find out!

        Thanks,

            Yaron

[1] There are many different proofs of my innate stupidity but in this case I thought the bug was still there because the camera screen showed black. Which was true. Except... well... the phone was resting on top of my black laptop. Seriously... I wonder how I get enough neurons together sometimes to get out of bed in the morning.

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Rogers [mailto:michael at briarproject.org] 
Sent: Friday, April 3, 2015 11:40 AM
To: Yaron Goland; Nathan of Guardian; thali-talk at thaliproject.org
Subject: Re: [Thali-talk] QR codes

On 02/04/15 18:14, Yaron Goland wrote:
> Samsung - When I brought the QR-Code app up the camera was still 
> black. But I then exited the QR-Code app and used the camera app for a 
> second and switched back to the QR-Code app and it worked!
> 
> Nexus - Previously the camera worked as soon as I opened the QR-Code 
> app. But after updating the camera now comes up black. But when I 
> tried the same trick as above it worked.

Thanks for letting me know about this. If it still happens with the latest version, could you possibly send me the logcat output?

> In experimenting with scanning the codes the experience was noticeably 
> more fiddly than yesterday. With the Samsung in particular I had to 
> hold the camera steady and get it to focus right before it 
> successfully scanned the code.

Sorry, I was messing around with auto-focus - it should be less fiddly now (though still far from perfect, especially on phones without macro focus).

> The experience wasn't horrible but it wasn't great either. It really 
> requires the user to understand what is going on, to move their phones 
> around a lot, etc. Personally, my opinion (which is worth exactly what 
> you paid for it) is that this is just too hard an experience. But 
> that's an opinion, not a fact.

Your opinion would be a bargain at twice the price. ;-)

I agree that the experience is still too fiddly and unreliable for production use. The only thing I'd say in its favour is that it's less bad than the other methods I've tried. If you write a proof-of-concept for a better method then I'll steal it without a moment's hesitation.

Cheers,
Michael