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Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

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Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#301

Post by munk-a »

dylancop wrote: post #211
realityking wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media format support will always be a chicken and egg problem. You got to start somewhere. Apple's approach of automatically converting images at the edges is the right way to go. It does require your software to be explicit about what media formats it understands. This is where the College Board failed.

>Media format support will always be a chicken and egg problem. You got to start somewhere. Funny thing to say in support of Apple. Maybe they should support WEBPs/WEBMs instead?

Their approach to supporting the new formats is actually quite easy to work with and properly defined input tags will just automagically trigger file conversions on the iOS side.

I also really dislike Apple's usual "my way or the highway approach" (it's causing my nephews serious issues since some of their remote learning tools use flash which Apple refuses to support) but in this case they are using the right approach to make it a smooth transition.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#302

Post by CamJN »

somehnguy wrote: post #88
crazygringo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've experienced that with AirDrop too, but that's because the iPhone knows the Mac can view them. Also you don't need an external tool -- Preview will convert HEIC to JPEG for you relatively instantly, even in batch. (Though I really do wish the phone would ask first if you want to convert, when Airdropping.)

I'll try Preview next time instead, thanks! iMazing works fine for the actual functionality but has some sort of bug where it won't re-open if I closed it without force quitting it. Minor but annoying.

That's likely an issue with iMazing not properly handling apple's saved ui state mechanism. You could try checking if holding the option key reveals a "quit and close all windows" option in the app's eponymous menu item, or press and hold the Shift key while opening the app to forget previous UI state.

If you don't care for apps to remember their previous windows and ui state, you can disable this mechanism in the settings app: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT204005#appresume

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#303

Post by derefr »

cozzyd wrote: post #262
Alupis wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HEIC isn't supported in a lot of places. It's mainly (only?) Apple that uses it with iOS devices. Perhaps Apple should make it easier or automatic to convert into a format that's universally usable. Bet the same thing would have happened with webp images too. JPG and PNG are like the FAT32 format of images. Always accepted, everywhere.

You know, I thought that about FAT32. But apparently neither Windows nor Mac OS X can see a FAT32 partition on an SD card if it's not the primary partition (at, least, not in an obvious way).

Windows and macOS do that in order to hide EFI system partitions, I believe. (Not that they should have to; MBR and GPT both define a specific tag to mark a partition as being an EFI partition. But so many partitioning tools don't bother to use that tag—or to adhere to any other standard that could be used to identify an EFI partition—that OSes are stuck with a very bad/loose heuristic.)

They may also get some other benefits from this bad/loose heuristic, e.g. hiding Linux's common FAT32 /boot partition; OEMs' "backup" and "BIOS update" partitions; OS Recovery partitions from unknown (and therefore unpredictable-in-approach) OSes; etc.

What the consumer OSes really need is a bit in each MBR/GPT partition's bitflags, that has a meaning equivalent to one of those "no user-serviceable parts inside" stickers. I think it's too late to fit that bit into either standard, sadly.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#304

Post by lisper »

munk-a wrote: post #289
lisper wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 At the very least, a message that appeared at the time that one attempted to upload the image with instructions on how to fix the problem on the spot . How hard could that have possibly been?

Quite hard? I mean shame on them for letting this bug through in the first place but I'd be pretty horrified if someone at CB tried to hot-fix this problem out. This isn't a small agile organization, it's enormous and may not have any route to get a patch out in less than a week due to QA requirements. (That isn't to say such slow deployment processes are good, but they do exist and may be contractually required)

Who said anything about a hot fix? They knew about the problem well ahead of time.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#305

Post by scott_s »

hamandcheese wrote: post #250
scott_s wrote: post #69

Earlier 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.

I think the issue is that accept is specified only with extensions rather than mime types.

I wondered that, too, but I couldn't find any HTML documentation that blessed one form as superior to the other. And I would be surprised if Apple automatically converted images for "accept=image/jpg" but not "accept=.jpg".

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#306

Post by munk-a »

oefrha wrote: post #140
xienyc wrote: post #101

Earlier 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…

> letting students take the test again. Yeah, that still fits "our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry". They have the submissions, the submissions can be easily converted to their target format. That's what they should do instead of asking students to take the test again. Or maybe they simply delete any accepted [1] submission that they deem corrupted, in which case I have nothing more to say. [1] Quote: > Spenc…

Spencer's file might be on the server but it sounds like their servers flat out refused to accept any files that looked like HEICs - so they never even got them on the server.

That's a stupid decision, especially when the submission window is timed - fiddling with file formats should never be a task you need to do inside of the testing window.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#307

Post by Jach »

gowld wrote: post #224
Mirioron wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This brings up an interesting point: how come math input is so difficult on a computer? Even TeX seems like an awful solution for this.

Ask a Chinese or Japanese friend why typing is hard.

Chinese friend: "If you use pinyin not at all. There are other ways such as stroke based, I have never learned it."

This matches my prediction. Typing Japanese isn't hard either (and I'm just a beginning learner) -- typing ha in JP mode gives は, or if you're only in JP mode the typical layout assigns that to qwerty 'f'. Like Chinese, IME drop-down selection works well for kanji.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#308

Post by simonh »

vb6sp6 wrote: post #240
mrlala wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? If you are developing an application/website and it doesn't work with 50% of your market share- then you are a dumbass for not implementing it. ESPECIALLY for an AP EXAM with consequences. This isn't like "oh no, 50% can't reach our site about cat videos". This is an EXAM. Honestly cannot believe people on here defending them not adding simple image support for 50% of the testers...

The point is that we have all seen what happens when we start letting a single company dictate formats. Because the next step is "i can't believe those lazy fucking programmers can't support heic2" or whatever magical bullshit they come up with after abandoning heic1. And it you want to talk about incompetence, I'd say pushing a format that is almost guaranteed to be incompatible with the millions of existing backend…

>...a single company dictate formats.

It's an ISO standard. Samsung phones use it as well.

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#309

Post by bobthepanda »

_bxg1 wrote: post #20
bobthepanda wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need some sort of standard for software engineering quality. I don't think this is an academic question anymore. Real people's lives are being impacted every day now by shoddy software, and with the current crisis they often have no alternative. Software that you or I could probably have executed better, but that the people who were hired to do it either a) couldn't, or b) didn't bother. It's nearly impossible f…

New sweat, tears and duct tape solutions are being created every day. Let's start by focusing on the ones coming down the pipe.

What matters to the bean counters is if it can be done without expensing something new, everything else be damned. Unless you can get a clear, popular government mandate to spend money to make things more efficient, this is not a palatable solution.

Given how large refactors tend to go in general, this also doesn't necessarily lead to good outcomes; even with a relatively technocratic administration led by Mike Bloomberg (relative to comparable mayors, at least), upgrading NYC's 911 system massively spun out of control: https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/911-overhaul-2b-disaste...

Re: Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

#310

Post by btilly »

derefr wrote: post #298
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd posit that Apple ought to assume the worst (ie nothing but JPEG and PNG is supported) if no format is specified. That's how we've built most of the web, to ensure backwards compatibility and avoid these kinds of problems. That said, come on College Board. Fix your crap. What a stupid bug.

If no format is specified, then the presumption would be that the website wants a raw octet stream, and that adulterating it would be the last thing a client device should do, because it knows nothing about what the website's going to do to the result.

Do you have any idea what that approach would do to bandwidth and latency?
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