All posts in Nick’s Ramblings

So, hello to anyone who cared. Today I received a call from a Tom K. at Chase Bank. We spoke for a pleasant 15 minutes about the issue, mobile development in general, and the seriousness with which Chase takes this and similar matters. This was great for me, because I’m not expecting an instant fix, and even in the world of software and push notifications there may not even be a fix for this edge case… but its good to know that at least the software engineers are looking into it.

Some salient points from our conversation:

• The uninstall of the application does not ping or communicate with Chase servers as an event. This means that in reality Chase has no way of knowing that the application has been uninstalled.
• The fact that only the last four of the account number is shown covers the Security aspect of this bug, but we also talked about the profile of information that you can gather about the PERSON, in my opinion outweighs the account number itself. I know how much money you have, where and on what you spend it, how you are moving it, etc.
• They are brainstorming potential solutions, but each one of them thought up so far would be more intrusive to the normal functioning of the application, and would thus hinder its use for “normal” setups while trying to address an edge case.
• Tom was not sure if they are linking the push notifications to your phone number, or to the internal iOS device address. This would only matter for what you should do to “reset” the device in the case of a sale.

Here’s my two cents on a viable solution that would not affect existing users:

1. Don’t hassle with the uninstall if you don’t get any notification of that event. (If you do you could fix it there and be done).
2. Freshly install the application - not much gets pinged to Chase here either, so just wait
3. On the FIRST successful log in on a NEWLY installed application, you could trigger a process to clean out old linkages of push alerts to that phone.

Point number three is the big point there. The customer expectation when they are uninstalling an application is that it will unlink that device from the applications’ servers. Maybe we cannot technically support that event, but the first logon on a fresh installation of the application is accompanied by the customers expectation that they will have a blank slate. This, or a variation thereof, would fulfill the customers’ unspoken expectations, and would not affect the existing working use cases of the application as a whole.

And on a final thought. Tom was kind enough to provide the phone number you can call to unlink push notifications for your accounts. You could use this if you fear you may have given an iPhone or iPod Touch after uninstalling the Chase Mobile App. That number is 1(877)CHASE-PC

Good afternoon Readers!

I’m hoping that you are all doing well and are gearing up for some serious holiday action. So today I wanted briefly to talk about the website design, and how we have done our best so that most of you will never really notice the cool things that we did. There is this saying when it comes to design, and it is more or less along the lines of “if the design is good, it will facilitate the consumption of the material, but it will mostly go unnoticed by the majority of users”.

One of the fun things we did with this website was to choose a responsive theme. This has to do with the way our theme behaves on different sizes of computers, tablets, and phones. I bet most of you didn’t even notice, but resize your browser window right now and watch how the site reacts… go on… I’ll wait. Did you see that magic? Pull out your phone and browse to the site… come on, just do it… Bam… different display and nav menu.

If you want to see more or less what I am talking about, just go to http://responsive.is/demonarchives.com and play around with the different devices on top. And there you have it ladies and gentleman, a really cool design technique that resizes both images and text, and flows the layout so that each reader is presented with a readable and enjoyable website.

We hope you are all well, and that you will be able to pass some quality time over the holidays with your loved ones. For those of you who can’t, stay tuned and maybe I’ll be able to get Seba and Matias to do some fun holiday themed sketches that will lighten your heart.

Take care, and stay tuned for the final entry in the powered armor science articles due out tomorrow.

So, the other day I posted about how ridiculously awesome the technicians are over at FireHost. They came out of nowhere the other day and basically said:

“Hey, we know other hosting providers provide SHIT service and try to resolve all of your problems with more hardware ($$), but we are so ridiculously badass that we have thought of a way to make your site even leaner and faster than we already made it… Varnish baby… so… will you let us save you money and provide a better product to your users?”

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