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Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
141–150 of 577 posts
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how…
If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format. Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format. Good product design is owning your users' success. It…
While I kind of agree with the sentiment, I'm also totally done with the notion of "Apple decides to have their own unique format every 2 years, and makes the change in a backwards incompatible way, so now the world needs to kowtow to them, despite Apple dragging their feet in many areas of standardization."
Seriously, fuck Apple. It took legal changes in the EU to force them to the "Just f'ing support USB-C like the rest of the world instead of making half your money selling dongles".
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#143I am 100% on the side of the school. Unlike with JPEG, everybody who wants to work with HEIC should pay licence fees. Also, HEIC is like 50x more complex than JPEG. I hope the world will never get to a point, where each phone brand stores photos in their own format, and you need a special software from the phone manufacturer to view the photos (that is what we have now with raw photography formats, and what we used t…
JPEG is like 50x more complex than PPM, but we eventually moved off that standard as well due to storage size and feature limitations. Plus, it's being adopted by both iPhone and Android--it's not like it's a proprietary format specific only to Apple.
Not to mention HEIF/HEIC images take up a fraction of the space of equivalent quality JPEGs, which is significant if you're a shutterbug who fills up their phone with photos.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#144This is the latest in a string of incidents where critical software systems, facing new pressure due to the pandemic, are catastrophically failing their users. I think what's happened in the past is that most public-facing software systems either a) were not really critical (because people had the alternative of doing things in-person), or b) (as in the case of all the ancient COBOL systems underpinning the US gov) h…
Missing HEIC support (and Apple support in general) is not an issue of quality; it's an issue of "knowing your customers". I doubt there could be any certification body for that.
>>> I doubt there could be any certification body for that.
Plot twist: There is. It's a standard clause in software procurement contracts, especially for government.
"The application must be supported and tested on browsers with at least 10% market share, as defined by the yearly Gartner report"
Replace browser with device or what is relevant for the project.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#145I thought iOS was supposed to convert HEIC images to JPEG automatically behind-the-scenes in any file transfer situation where HEIC isn't supported. The article itself even says: > iPhones convert HEICs to JPEGs automatically when they’re attached to emails in the Mail app I'm just curious technically why the same didn't happen with the testing portal? If you have a webpage that accepts image uploads, is iOS Safari n…
The article reads to me like the people who had problems sent the images from the phone to their computer, which may not trigger the automatic conversion? One air dropped it to the computer and renamed it PNG, another renamed it JPEG, but they were probably HEIC files with the wrong file extension.
I believe those students had received noticed to use png/jpeg, and their solution was to change the file extensions. The website accepted them without issue, but these students later received emails telling that their photo was corrupt. The other, unaware students tried to upload the HEIC directly from their phones and the website stopped responding causing their test time to expire.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#146.
This, last time i encountered it even windows 10 didn't display them and wanted me to buy a decoder from windows store. This was probably due to licensing fees.
This story shows what happens when you 'think different' from established standards.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm trying to square this with the fact people pointed out downthread, which is that iPhones will automatically convert HEIC images to jpeg from an HTML input form. Perhaps it's the `isAllowedExtension` check? If `e.target.files` is the actual file names on disk (and not whatever temporary file the browser made out of the HEIC file), that would cause a problem.
Apparently somebody claims to have been able to change the extension and submit the picture, but got "file corrupted" later: "Senior Dave Spencer took a demo test before his Calculus AB exam to make sure he understood the process for uploading photos. He Airdropped an iPhone image of his responses to his Mac and tried to convert it by renaming the HEIC file to PNG. Changing a file’s extension does not guarantee that…
Anyone who says that young people are better with computers these days needs to keep this paragraph on file.
I can’t really blame the college board for this kind of mistake. Like would he assume that taking a .docx and renaming it to .pdf converts it?
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#148Here's the relevant frontend source code for the file upload picker, if anyone's wondering (webpack://src/components/exam/submissions/FileInput.js): { const [file] = Object.keys(e.target.files).map(key => e.target.files[key]) const fileSizeInMb = file.size/(CONVERSION_BASE*CONVERSION_BASE) const fileSizeInKb = file.size/CONVERSION_BASE const split = file.name.split('.') const fileType = split[split.length-1].toLowerC…
So do we know yet why iOS wasn't auto-converting the HEIC images? Is it because they didn't use mime types in the `accept` attribute?
A lot of the people with issues appear to have airdropped the photo to their computer (which doesn't trigger the auto-conversion path), and then uploaded it from there (possibly using a non-Safari browser, which wouldn't do any conversion).
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#149.
So you build a service that doesn’t properly validate or gracefully handle invalid file types and it’s my fault as the end user when I try to upload something and the system fails?
If you build a service that can’t support one of the most commonly used platforms in the world, that’s on you the developer, not me the user. This is software engineering 101 right here, and was completely avoidable on the part of the developers.
Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images
#150> Basically, only Apple (and, more recently, Samsung) use the HEIC format — most other websites and platforms don’t support it. Even popular Silicon Valley-based services, such as Slack, don’t treat HEICs the same way as standard JPEGs. This is the key part. Many in the software industry still believes that the start-up mindset of break things move fast applies to us. The economy depends on software, governments depe…
You're suggesting bureaucratic "software" works better? I don't put as much faith in that as you.
> You're suggesting bureaucratic "software" works better?
It works for building regulations, for electric regulations, for food safety regulations, for all the rest of industries actually. If anything we see people dying because that regulations are not enforced or are removed after lobbying.
So, software is not going to be "better" but more reliable and a less costly foundation for the rest of business and industries. So, software is going to be better for the end users even if it is worse for us to develop.
Do you think that all the students that are now worried of failing are thinking "at least I got HEIC images in my phone". They do not care, and why should they?
Regulations are a trade off. How deep and or even intrusive future regulation are going to be depends on how much misalignment there is between Apple/Google/Facebook business models and everyone else needs and wants. Each time that the Internet is broken and costs people time and money, the fingers are going to point to our industry.