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iPhone Alarms Hit By New Year's Bug
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!"
Date issues... These have been "known problems" for ages, there are libraries for this. Why aren't those being used?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
moox. for a new generation.
Day light saving errors, new year errors, do they just have crappy coders at apple?
Apple can't quite seem to get that alarm working right. This isn't the first time. My Android based phone hasn't had any issues with the alarm, but since I work from home it's not as much of an issue.
well you could have an alarm clock like mine that randomly started passing time at a much faster pace so that at 1am your 8am alarm is blasting. That's when I started relying primary on my phone over a normal alarm clock.
Errr, why NOT use a phone as an alarm clock? Virtually every smart phone typically needs to be charged daily. If it doesn't need to be, generally people do anyways. Plug it in, let it charge overnight while you're sleeping, alarm wakes you in the morning, ready to go and fully charged.
It's *better* than your average AC alarm clock, as a power failure throughout the night won't interfere with your alarm. The phone's battery keeps you covered. I've been using my cell phones as alarm clocks for, well, as long as cell phones have had alarm clocks. I've never once had a problem with it.
And I've certainly never once considered getting a 'traditional' alarm clock since having a phone that could do the job just fine and, thanks to the magic of custom alarm/ringtones, much less offensively.
Meh.
See, this is why you need to convince your girlfriend to get into the habit of morning sex. There is no alarm clock more reliable than the human wang and as an added bonus there is no snooze button either :P
Monstar L
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...
This just isn't a plausible claim. As if "anonymous reader" has a girlfriend. Now I've heard everything.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I started using my phone as an alarm clock after discovering that although a backup battery will allow a regular alarm clock to keep the time through a power failure, the alarm will not ring if the power is out at the time of the alarm.
It just works.
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.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
The point is that the iOS time routines are unreliable. You need a redundant clock/alarm that doesn't run on iOS.
I bought my girlfriend an iPhone, and the damn thing seems to set off the alarm at random times.
However, when I look at that thing, my Nokia N95 looks like crap in comparison. I'm no Apple fanboy, but I am really impressed with that thing.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
these are simple errors that anyone who has written clock and alarm code should be aware of to begin with. It's not like date and time algorithms change very often or without a lot of fanfare.
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.
Really? Is that what really happened?
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
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.
So you're the guy who wrote the $999.99 app? Excellent use of your degree.
"...My girlfriend wasn't impressed, sleeping in, and I wasn't either, having to race her to work!"
So for once in your life, you have an iron-clad excuse as to why you were late to work (posted on Slashdot, confirmed by vendor), and you're bitching?
That is sad, when you really think about it. Sad.
I hope we've all made time and date mistakes before, that I'm not the only one. I wrote some accounting software that ran a script every hour that calculated a set of numbers for billing information. Each hour the script would run, then at midnight another script would run to calculate the average hourly total for the day. To calculate the average, I merely added each hour's numbers together then divided by 24. My fatal mistake was assuming each day contained 24 hours, which would normally be true, except for one day. This specific day, the script ran only 23 times instead of 24 due to daylight savings time skipping an hour. The mistake lead to an artificially deflated average and quite the yelling from my boss. You would think we programmers could assume something simple like there being 24 hours in a day, but apparently our time and date system wasn't invented by a programmer.
We've gotta nap for that!
What's to excuse? Bugs happen, they get fixed.
Two points here.
First of all, it's not the first time 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.
and the 2nd being Sunday, I am actually surprised how many people have crappy jobs that hey had to get up for on the weekends.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
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.
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.
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.
This is absolutely correct. CS is not software engineering, it's not programming, and it's not computer engineering.
CS = Theory and research into computation. What is computable, on what sort of machine, in what time bounds. Research into new applications for computation (such as machine vision or natural language processing).
SWE = The engineering process of delivering software that is functional and reasonably defect-free on time and on budget.
CE = The design and engineering of computer systems. CPUs, GPUs, buses, storage systems, interconnects, etc.
Programming = The act of creating code, which (when done correctly) requires skills from CS, SWE, and CE.
The bottom line is that you can't be a good coder unless you have at least some of all three skills. Algorithms and time complexity matter. So does writing code that actually performs on real hardware. So does writing code that is maintainable and reasonably defect-free.
I am fortunate that my "CS" program was actually more of a CS+CE+SWE program. I am not an expert in any of those fields but I do know enough to work effectively on a team to solve problems and write good code.
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.
Unfortunately I am getting this vibe more and more from Apple's latest offering. Their earlier iPhone was great, and their new iPhone's glassy facade gives me a woody every time I see it. But there seems to be one critical problem after another with this one.
Are they the new Microsoft? Is this the Vista of the iPhones?
FWIW I'm 25 and I use dedicated alarm clock - though it's electronic and not mechanical. The reason is that 1) it has a nice and simple display for a bedside clock that doesn't shine too much at night (dim red digits and no not-quite-black backlight), and 2) it's got a nice huge snooze button.
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?
Assuming the "mission" is wake me up in the morning, everyone I know excluding my parents uses a phone.
what's an alarm clock? seriously, my wife and I haven't had one in the bedroom for years. We've also never had issues like this with alarms on any previous cell/smartphone.
As for lots of key presses, that's a one time event on most phones. Unlike a bedside phone, I can set multiple alarms. say one for weekdays and one for weekends, and one for that day i had to get up really freakin early. Reusing an alarm is as simple as tapping the toggle from off to on.
I'm just amazed by the number of people on here that are acting like it's the users fault this very basic fucntionality doesn't work. Oh, just don't use it. WTF? Of course when it's Apple, they get a pass on this kind of stuff. We're just holding it wrong, right?
Again, what if this was Microsoft, and Zunes stopped working because of leap year related issues. Would you have excused them? Or would you have posted "I have to wonder why MS's quality assurance department (don't laugh, they must have one) didn't try setting the clock ahead to see what happens?"
"It doesn't work, but it sure looks sexy"
You are nothing but a hypocrite and an apple fanboi. Your comment history does suggest that you were jumping up and down on much more trivial bugs than this when it was other companies who were at fault, but when it comes to apple, it 'just happens, and gets fixed'.
It's because of douches like you I stay away from apple. Go, Steve Jobs is waiting for his next blowjob.
Most of the new degree students coming in have no knowledge of your explanation. People in their teens go into a CS degree thinking it is the ONLY path to get college-trained for Programming, for Information Technology. Few actually seek out CS fully knowing at their inexperienced ages about the definition of CS you gave. But incorrect choice of "Programmer vs. CS holder" training is only a small part of the systemic flaw. Most public and private colleges only have "CS," but like you said, it DOES train you on the other three.
People on /. who themselves are industry-savvy geeks worldwide that still mistake the degrees all the time, assume that ALL teenagers know to just research tradeschools for their sub career from your post. In reality, trade schools like DeVry aren't more renowned than MIT, and people may choose a more recognized name granting them more interviews even if they only offer the "wrong" field.
So people just grit their teeth and get locked into "CS." Sometimes they can't get accepted into their trade school. Right, you won't always make it into that well-researched school that does offer your CE or SWE or Prog program. And in spite of everything, only 20% of people are college-trained. Other disciplines tend to force the degree requirements while ours usually waves it off for 2 years of "equivalent" experience.
In any case, after my OP nobody cared that 80% of the people out there have no degree and still release code that is mission critical (for non-business values of "critical" where consumers are average Joes.) If I were to tell people on the current thread that 20% of their doctors and their president are certified by a degree, there'd be switching and complaining regarding the poor state of such "loose" and dangerous health-care and legal systems. This shows that defenders of the non-degree IT career path are field-biased. It's just more than a blessing for them to be in that 80% "unlicensed but perfectly employable" group when so many other fields ensure that equivalent mistakes as the Apple calendar bug are properly prevented, prepared against and systemically fixed to avoid disaster.
Their earlier iPhone was great, and their new iPhone's glassy facade gives me a woody every time I see it. But there seems to be one critical problem after another with this one.
Personally I think it's mostly the media having a field day blowing things out of proportion. I have the new iPhone, both my sisters have one, my brother-in-law has one and none of us have had anywhere near the problems that are being reported in the media. Sure, there's been a few minor glitches here and there but nearly EVERY device has those. We certainly haven't experienced any problems that were major enough to stop us from using the iPhone or consider switching to another device.
Sapere aude!
Tons of keypresses? You don't own an iPhone do you? I have 6 alarms on mine, 3-4 to help me get up in the morning with various tones and one for weekends plus another for random things. Adding or changing any of them takes me about 10 seconds. Oh, and NONE of them are working right now! I do have an alarm clock, there's a ton of reasons why I use the phone instead starting with being able to use different tones for different alarms and with the ease of changing them or setting them. I have yet to find an alarm clock with more than 2 different alarms and one or two tones. In short - the iPhone, when it works, makes for an awesome alarm that has no issues with loss of power. Bonus is that I own it for other things.
when will folks figure out this isn't "just a phone" and see that is a small multifunction computer?!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I don't understand why you use a phone as an alarm clock.
- The phone sets itself, inluding daylight savings time.
- It charges next to my bed so I have a fresh charge the next day. This is a good idea anyway despite you're implied suggestion oterwise.
- I have it set to only go off on weekdays.
- I have it with me so I can set it right away if I have to work on saturday or go in earlier the next day.
- It can display a text message about why it's going off.
- Instead of setting the time, I can just tell it to go off in 3 hours because Im taking a nap.
- I have my alarm with me when Im sleeping somewhere other than home.
- Ive been doing this without fail for years. My stupid ass alarm clock, however, needed a lot more attention.
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