karl
November 19th, 2012, 09:52 AM
Anyone wanting to skip December - and there are bound to be a fair number who fall into that category - is in luck because there is an app for that.
No, not from Apple, but rival Google.
The ability to skip December, however, is not by design but by omission. Google developers failed to include December in the People app in the latest version of the Android mobile operating system.
Users attempting to add a friend's birthday using the "date picker" feature of the People app in recently-released Android 4.2 are able to do so in any month as long as it is not December.
According to initial reports, the bug appears to be limited to the People app and does not affect Android's Calendar app.
Google has acknowledged the bug, and is working on a fix for the problem, but there's no date for a fix release.
"The cause turns out to be a subtle but common one in the world of programming: an off-by-one mistake, where the array that's used for the month references is zero-indexed, so it goes {0,1,2,3... 11},"The Guardian explains. "But the month numbers go {1,2,3....12}. If you shift the index by 1, but forget to allow the highest value of the array to be 12 rather than 11, you'll kill December."
Presumably Google will eventually restore December, but hopefully they will wait until January, so we can all opt out.
Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/it-downtime-blog/2012/11/want-to-skip-december-theres-a.html
No, not from Apple, but rival Google.
The ability to skip December, however, is not by design but by omission. Google developers failed to include December in the People app in the latest version of the Android mobile operating system.
Users attempting to add a friend's birthday using the "date picker" feature of the People app in recently-released Android 4.2 are able to do so in any month as long as it is not December.
According to initial reports, the bug appears to be limited to the People app and does not affect Android's Calendar app.
Google has acknowledged the bug, and is working on a fix for the problem, but there's no date for a fix release.
"The cause turns out to be a subtle but common one in the world of programming: an off-by-one mistake, where the array that's used for the month references is zero-indexed, so it goes {0,1,2,3... 11},"The Guardian explains. "But the month numbers go {1,2,3....12}. If you shift the index by 1, but forget to allow the highest value of the array to be 12 rather than 11, you'll kill December."
Presumably Google will eventually restore December, but hopefully they will wait until January, so we can all opt out.
Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/it-downtime-blog/2012/11/want-to-skip-december-theres-a.html