Thursday, January 3, 2013

Apple won't fix Do Not Disturb bug

from thetelegraph.co.uk
The Do Not Disturb feature on the iPhone won’t be resolved until it fixes itself on Monday, Apple has confirmed.

The popular Do Not Disturb feature stops the iPhone ringing unless specific or persistent callers are trying to get in touch. Since January 1, however, it has not turned itself off at the time specified by users.

In a new support document, Apple acknowledged the problem, describing it as “After January 1st, 2013, Do Not Disturb mode stays on past its scheduled end time.”

It said, however, that “Do Not Disturb scheduling feature will resume normal functionality after January 7, 2013. Before this date, you should manually turn the Do Not Disturb feature on or off.”

Users should be able to schedule when the feature turns itself off and the phone resumes normal operation. Developers, however, have speculated that the way the software formats dates could have caused the problems around the new year.

Apple iOS developer Patrick McCarron suggested on Twitter that Apple had made a common mistake by incorrectly formatting how the iOS software defines dates, allowing the underlying software, based on Unix, to define the final week of 2012 as ending on January 7.

That would mean the feature will resolve itself as Apple suggests.

Apple has previously had a string of similar problems with dates. In March 2011, the iPhone 4 clocks went back rather than forward as daylight saving changed. Earlier in the same year, a clock glitch prevented alarms from sounding on New Year's Day, and the devices also struggled to adjust to the end of daylight savings time back in November.

The glitch affected iPhone owners who subscribe through both AT&T and Verizon.

A simple solution - either shutting down the phone or switching it to and from airplane mode - offered little comfort to users who had already missed appointments on Sunday.

When clocks went back in 2010, the iPhone's clock automatically went back one hour as planned, but a fault meant the alarm didn't synchronise, meaning users were woken up an hour later than intended.

Scores of iPhone 4 users flooded blogs and internet chat boards to vent their frustration.

It is likely that the bug will be fixed in a minor update over the course of 2013, or in the new version of iOS, to prevent a repeat in 2014.



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