Happy New Year everyone, I slept in rather late this morning. Which isn't too bad I suppose I had no appointments to be late for. I just assumed I had just slept through the alarm, Then I started reading on Twitter then there was in fact in a
bug in the iPhone alarm.
Surely this is madness I thought, It can't be, something as simple as an alarm wont just stop working because its New Years. I mean its not like its
Y2K or anything. An alarm is a relatively simple thing, if its the pre set time make noise.
if ( time = timeAlarmSet )
{
makeNoise();
}
Granted the actually code is probably a little more involved, but an alarm is still a relatively simple function. I'm a software engineer so I have some knowledge on the subject. But I think what has happened here is that in an effort to be smart and awesome like all Apple products ( cause they always
succeed right? ) Someone thought they should try something clever instead of just make the alarm simple as it should be, and just moving on to the next exciting part of iOS development.
So now the iPhone alarm wont work until the 3rd of January 2011, alarms set to recur will still work fine. But somewhere along the way a bug has crept in that makes single alarms a kind of moot point. I'm sure nothing major will happen because of this, just a lot of people sleeping in the next few days, a lot of people will be late for work, hopefully without any repercussions. But its something that was so totally avoidable, it makes the
second time that an oversight on something that should be very simple on Apple's part has resulted in great inconvenience.
Its just mind boggling to me as a producer and tester of software, that something like that get past testing, even more boggling is that it's from Apple and on devices with such crazy saturation. Its not like they aren't making money of this thing, or they have competition with similar market share. Granted I know making the alarm function may be boring compared to working on the Retina Display or FaceTime functions, but that is no excuse for this, you still have your job to.
I just wanted to make people aware, for whatever good it will do for the next three days.
In closing I just want to put out there. Imagine what might have happened if Apple iOS (whatever version is was) was the majority of the market share when Y2K or the "millennium bug" happened. Probably nothing would have happened. But when this like events like this, and
that can get through it gives me pause, and makes kinda grateful for Windows. Maybe not, but hopefully it makes someone think.
I'm not Apple bashing, just ranting. Apple is here to stay and provides useful technology and services. I still plan on using their products for the foreseeable future, Just getting this off my chest.
See you next time, and Happy New Year again, especially to those people who will not be woken up for three days.
