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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

#351

Post by eyjafjallajokul »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #269
pwthornton wrote: post #111

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. 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…

> The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. To clarify: It has the best selling model, but it is not the most used mobile OS among US mobile phone users.

What data are you basing this on?

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

#352

Post by gbear605 »

IvanK_net wrote: post #284
whalesalad wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay so JPEG for the rest of eternity then?

Of course not. But if we are talking about replacing JPG, two things are necessary: a new format should not be restricted by patents and licence fees, and such movement has to be coordinated with all other "players" in the industry. Apple did not do any of it.

But that isn’t true about HEIC. There isn’t a license fee.

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

#353

Post by gbear605 »

cm2187 wrote: post #84

What saddens me the most is to see those kids who grew up with a smartphone in their hand trying to convert a picture by renaming it. It is a problematic form of computer illiteracy.

There are lots of website and apps where renaming the file is the best solution for an enduser, because of systems that are the counter part of this that limit the option on the frontend but allow it on the backend. There’s no reason why any system should care about a file’s extension type. It’s meaningless.

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

#354

Post by azinman2 »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #348
azinman2 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, as many others have pointed out by specifying the accepted file formats in the tag, they would avoid HEIC entirely as the phone would simply convert to one of the accepted formats. It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend. Even if that were the case, I'm certain there is some commercial license software they c…

1. I think both parties are at fault The testing system for not using the tag appropiately and Apple for using a closed, patent encumbered format as the default when most of their users don't know about software patents. > It's also not clear to me that this patent license is actually an issue in terms of decoding and converting file formats on the backend. It's reasonable to assume that it is. 2. Sure, the college c…

1. I'm not going to argue about Apple's defaults here. It simply isn't germane when the college board has full control over the inputs and iPhones will make up a significant portion of test takers.

2. I think you don't understand what the College Board is. It's a single organization that administers test. This isn't something each university needs to deal with. They make and administer the test to all college-bound students in the US each year.

3. There are plenty of existing open source decoders, and all major open source graphics programs already accept the format (GraphicConverter, ImageMagick, GIMP), in addition to all the major OSes (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android).

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

#355

Post by JohnTHaller »

tpush wrote: post #287
JohnTHaller wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. To clarify: It has the best selling model, but it is not the most used mobile OS among US mobile phone users.

iOS's market share in the US is 61.25% according to [1]. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...

StatCounter shows the number of folks who visit sites with StatCounter on it.

Fun fact: iOS users generally do more browsing, so this has a tendency to skew stats like StatCounter.

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

#356

Post by kbenson »

alasdair_ wrote: post #333
mfarris wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard. Apple was early in supporting the standard. Windows, Android, others have followed. More to come. When venting one's spleen, it's best to be at least a tiny bit correct.

>HEIC was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group as an open standard. It’s hard to call something an “open standard” if anyone who wishes to use it needs to license patents from nokia. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_F... under “licensing”)

And MPEG (through MPEG-LA) has long been known to be fairly active in litigating (or facilitating litigation) of the patents they administer.

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

#357

Post by Alupis »

simonh wrote: post #313
Alupis wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HEIC isn't simple, and isn't common. Apple should convert to JPG or PNG when exporting the image to anywhere anytime. The same problem happens with webp images too - totally unusable almost everywhere, even in photoshop. Apple wants to reduce storage space photos take up. Fine - but they should convert back to a standard format when exporting the image to be used on some other system. With that said, it seems the iss…

Nothing starts common, you have to start somewhere, and it is an ISO standard format.

A file format, used by one company, isn't going to change the world.

JPG and PNG are here to stay. Love it or hate it... they are the lowest common denominator for image formats.

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

#358

Post by trhway »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #318
azinman2 wrote: post #299

It’s amazing to me that so many are blaming Apple. Despite the fact that this site is all about new technology (so ironic!), uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case. They should have tested this, and apparently they did enough to send a tweet about it.. as if that’s enough. Clearly the college board dropped the ball in adequately informing people of their not-great workaround, instead of either sp…

Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3], so I actually blame Apple for using a closed format by default. [1] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923 [2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...

>Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3]

College board could have added "iPhone HEIC license surcharge" for those users - that would have gotten Apple attention :)

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

#359

Post by cesarb »

MattGaiser wrote: post #189
tyrust wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Simple tech literacy was missing in the 1% of students that failed this test through their HEIC submissions. Even though I acknowledge the panic of a weird circumstance during an important test, editing the extension in file explorer is just too far from logical. I don't think this is a fair statement. Image file formats are something that very few people need to think about these days. As another commenter pointed…

> why wouldn't changing the extension trigger the OS to convert the file? If you change the extension on any operating system and then open it in the image viewer, it does appear to work. It doesn't as image viewers do not trust the file extension and ignore it, but there is no indication of that to the average user.

> image viewers do not trust the file extension and ignore it

Not all of them; for instance, if I rename a .jpg to a .png exension and try to open it with Gnome's EOG, it presents an error saying "Not a PNG file", instead of showing the image.

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

#360

Post by gbear605 »

qubex wrote: post #276
mchan889 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These students are high school students. I'm very doubtful that this course covered material like file types and encoding. First year CS classes are almost exclusively programming basics and architecture. This line of thinking only really makes sense if you presuppose that every person taking a computer science course in high school has an understanding of file types. Many don't have this knowledge. I don't see why s…

She’s taking an exam. Surely she should understand these things by the end of the curriculum, right? I mean, she’s just been learning them... or should have. Besides, I don’t know what it’s like in the US nowadays, but back in my time (late 1990s, IB) the computer science curriculum took file formats and so forth as granted, and concentrated on the theoretical constructs such as Turing machines, lambda calculus, deci…

Was that all covered by your first semester course? Because if so, that’s more impressive than a first semester course and MIT, CMU, or Harvard, let alone what a public school can offer.
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