App Glitch trouble

     As if daylight savings time isn’t trouble enough, now the iPhone alarm clock app has a glitch with repeating alarms.  If you had an alarm set for something it was ringing an hour late.

     I’m wondering how in the world a problem like this ended up happening.  From what the reports say, the actual clock rolled forward, the alarms just didn’t go off on time.

     As a programmer, I can think of only a couple of scenarios that would create this situation.  First one, that the iOS doesn’t really change for daylight savings time, some coder just wrote a couple of lines of code that make the clock display one hour more than before when the country is on standard time.   Then, when the app sets alarms, it sets them not according to the time being displayed, but the actual internal clock time.  This is just bad coding, something that could have been prevented if QA had just double checked the code.

     The second option is more worrisome.  The only other possibility I can see is that for some stupid reason, the iPhone and related devices all have a second internal clock, one that follows DST, the other that follows UTC, resulting in the possibility of setting your programs clock settings to the wrong clock.  This would be a major engineering oversight, and would throw another wrench in the already shaky reputation the iPhone 4 has. 

     But in the end, what’s done is done.  If you’re looking for the solution that Apple came up with for this problem, its here, but they say the problem should have been fixed on the 7th.