iPhone Alarms Hit By New Year's Bug 405
An anonymous reader writes "Non-recurring iPhone alarms stopped working on January 1 for devices running iOS 4.02, 4.1, and 4.2.1. Apparently, it will fix itself by January 3, and the current workaround is to set the alarm to repeat. My girlfriend wasn't impressed, sleeping in, and I wasn't either, having to race her to work!"
Comment removed (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Use a real alarm clock (Score:5, Insightful)
They're probably (like me,) old nokia candy bar phone users. You could leave the battery dead for a week where the phone wouldn't even power on, but it would still wake up and tell you to go hop in the shower for work for another week or so. Phone clock (and more importantly, phone alarm clock) software has been stable and 100% trustworthy now for over a decade. I still have two extra (wall plug) alarm clocks for those occasions when you absolutely have to be there on time, but my phones have served me well as my primary alarm solution for the last 10 years, am i'm sure that's the case for most other people, as well.
What's with apple and alarms in phones? (Score:5, Insightful)
Day light saving errors, new year errors, do they just have crappy coders at apple?
Re:Use a real alarm clock (Score:5, Insightful)
Why shouldn't I use a phone as an alarm clock? I have been using my phone as my 'watch' and as my alarm clock since getting my first mobile back in 1999.
It has multiple advantages:
1) It allows me to set the required waking time during the day when I'm at work and find out what will be my schedule tomorrow, do I have a 8:00 meeting that I need a bit of preparation, etc.
2) Alarm clocks usually have a single alarm time and don't work well for multiple people - I want to keep napping if my wife's alarm rings first and vice versa;
3) The phone is always with me - it ensures that I can stay with my clock habits when on a hotel on business trip or when I'm staying over at a friends place - no need to bother with different options;
4) On decent mobiles, alarm clock function works even when the phone is turned off due to low battery - the screen and calls are off, but the alarm still ran;
5) It's more accurate than an alarm clock - since it must sync time with the operator anyway for proper functioning, it's always accurate, I never have to adjust it (as for a watch), and it handles daylight savings time automagically.
Frankly, the only issue is how deeply faulty your testing process has to be to ship with such bugs in core functions such as clock and making calls? It's not a frigging computer you're shipping, it's a consumer device for which these functions are not 'additionally included applets', but main features of the product...
Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:CS 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
For what it's worth, I've never taken a CS class. As to whether that makes me underqualified or not, well, I guess that's up to the rest of the world to decide, but my employer seems happy with me.
So, let's see.
1. You seem to assume that shareware is bad code, but quite a lot of the shareware I've used over the years has been excellent.
2. Nothing to do with "Apps" has anything to do with the built-in clock and alarm in the iPhone, which is part of the Apple-provided stuff, presumably developed by relatively qualified developers.
3. You have this rant about "Visual Basic". Whatever. I have an app in the app store, and I have never in my life touched VB.
4. Who cares about a 4-year BS? For crying out loud, I never even finished high school, nor did I get a GED. Instead, I hopped on over to doing college, where I got a BA in Psychology.
Just given the quality of this rant, if I had to choose between you and whoever wrote the code with this bug in it, I'd probably take the author of the buggy code, because that person might just have made a silly mistake, which most people do from time to time. I know you're incoherent; I'll take someone I just know made a single mistake over totally incoherent any day.
Re:Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
It just works...if it's approved, and if you hold it the right way, and if don't mind being late, and ...
Re:Use a real alarm clock (Score:5, Insightful)
That's probably the sort of thinking that resulted in the bug in the first place. Dealing with time zones and daylight savings issues and the goofy calendar is a big pain in the ass. It's easy to get it subtly wrong. I doubt there's a programmer alive who hasn't made at least one mistake in dealing with time and dates.
I suggest we adopt a 12 month 30 day calendar, with a five day holiday at the end of the year (six days for leap year.) And no friggin' daylight savings.
Re:Use a real alarm clock (Score:5, Insightful)
What's to excuse? Bugs happen, they get fixed.
Two points here.
First of all, it's not the first time [appleinsider.com] a stupid but major bug is found in iOS alarm app.
Second, it's a major issue. Alarm not going off at the right time is a bug that would be classified as "critical" under any sane categorization system - it's the most basic, fundamental function of the application not working properly. Even worse, alarm is by its nature a "mission critical" app - unlike most other stuff, which is annoying but mostly harmless when it fails, this one really trips you up. Consequently, it should be heavily tested.
And this leads us to another issue... these kinds of bugs, both this one and the one back in November, show that unit and functional testing coverage of the alarm app in iOS is really horrible. I mean, DST change and year change? It's some of the most obvious and basic corner cases that you write tests for, especially in an application that specifically deals with time! It's practically textbook stuff, or an interview question for QA position. And so it's extremely surprising when that kind of thing goes wrong in production.
Re:CS 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
never mind that not every CS degree makes you a programmer
No CS degree makes you a programmer. They make you a Computer Scientist.
Proper testing is a function of Software Engineering. This isn't some nitpick: they're completely different fields that both happen to often involve computers, and are frequently confused by many people who go to school to learn CS when what they really want is to be a programmer.
This is exactly the kind of bug I'd expect from someone with a CS degree, fresh out of college and working their first SE job.
Re:Use a real alarm clock (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, really? Relying on a phone for one of its simplest features is "inexcusable"? Mobile phones have been able to do this reliably for more than a decade. It's practically an Apple-only problem: for everyone else, it "just works".
But yeah, let's blame the victim.
Re:Use a real alarm clock (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody uses their phones as alarm clocks now.
Simply because it works reasonably well, is always on hand and works the same way at home, on business trips and vacations. And has a battery backup.
People simply assume the alarm function to be much too simple to allow even the stupidest developers to not get them right. Nobody expects people to mess up simple functions like that. And nobody expects the device itself to report the wrong time. For that reason, developers who can't get an alarm app working should be fired straight away. And OS developers who can't get their OS to report the correct time for each and every case should not only not be developing OS'es, but only be allowed to develop static HTML web pages for the rest of their careers.
Re:Use a real alarm clock (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember learning the correct date formulas in the first semester. What's so hard about them?
I think most of these bugs come about in the conversion between internal time storage (which is probably something simple like "seconds since the epoch") and the UI layer. Getting the number of days in the year is easy, but how do you then deal with things like timezones? What if the phone's moved timezone since the alarm was set? Then you have things like Daylight Saving (which varies according to where you are in the world - some countries don't observe it at all, others don't all observe it at the same dates).
Put it this way, if you wanted an example of something with real-life application that on the face of it looks simple but in reality is absolutely chock-full of corner cases for you to make mistakes in, you couldn't do much better than something date/time based.
Re:Use a real alarm clock (Score:5, Insightful)
But, I fail to see how this iPhone "bug" becomes an issue - there are many other ways to wake up or be reminded and if you rely on your iPhone for everything, you have a single point of failure.
So how many alarm clocks do you have on your bedside table? I have only ever had two alarm clocks that have ever been unreliable: a clock radio that would randomly turn itself on for a minute at a time throughout the night, and my iPhone which failed to wake me up this morning. All the other problems have been due to blackouts, which is why I only get clocks with battery backups.
I'm mean seriously, the age of digital watches being a pretty neat idea is over. Even the cheapest Chinese clocks can reliably sound an alarm at a specified time of the day. How could the iPhone get it so wrong?