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

Have to agree with this guy here.. if you are doing Q/A testing and you notice that an iphone doesn't work by default, you have a problem.

People used to say the same thing about Internet Explorer

Perhaps it's the iPhone that's broken then.

HEIC isn't exactly a commonly used, or widely accepted image format outside of Apple's world.

The question is, is it the exam developers task to produce software that works in the world as it is or the world as they would like it to be?

If the latter this is a roaring success.

Just a guess, but it seems like you work in theoretical lala land and never have to deliver something that works.

I'm not saying you are wrong- sure you can argue that it's the iPhone that is broken, from a non-standard format. However, if you are designing an app that needs pictures to be taken and about 45% of your customers (the students) can't just take a picture without going through some conversion while on a time sensitive test- then you majorly fucked up.

End of the day this is on the AP designers for not adding a format which 45% of their base will use by default.

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...

Scanners almost universally output in TIFF, and need to be converted to JPG or something more universally accepted. Nobody complains.

Some scanners even will do the conversion to JPG for you, because they know nobody accepts TIFF files.

If Apple does it, then everyone has to accept it?

And why? Because images are large and Apple's trying to reduce the size on the phone? How about giving everyone more than 5GB of iCloud storage in 2020? Google gives you 10-15GB for free, and costs half as much for more storage.

For premium-priced devices, this is absurd.

And they were correct. If more than 10% of the population is using it, it should be supported, particularly if you are providing a service that can affect people heavily (like AP test submission).

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 backends out there is profoundly stupid.

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 issue is from students that didn't upload the image from their phone (where Apple correctly converts to JPG), but rather transferred the image to their computer, then uploaded into the AP Exam.

If that's true, then this is absolutely on Apple. Why would they export in a format that literally nobody else supports. What are these people supposed to do with a folder full of HEIC formatted photos, that can't be uploaded anywhere else, edited with any program, or opened even opened on some Operating Systems?

Apple should assume nobody else uses HEIC because... well, nobody else uses HEIC.

>...a single company dictate formats.

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

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.

Well I could turn that around and say if you develop a phone and the image format it exports to is not accepted by 99% of websites maybe then you majorly fucked up.

File formats change fast. It was not too long ago PNG was the newcomer, and people were touting how much better it was than GIF for non-photographs (alpha transparency, better compression, etc.). It has been successful, and now almost all applications support it. Same thing with moving from AVI to the MPEG formats in video.

New formats are a good thing, and fast adoption of them is good for users.

But the phone does the right thing when told to do the right thing. If the input tag has a proper accepts attribute set the iPhone will transparently and automatically transcode a HEIC image to JPEG.

A file input tag with no accepts attribute when you're expecting a particular type of file is broken. Would Android phones be "majorly fucked up" if they stored images as WebP by default?

> it is an ISO standard format.

So is COBOL[0]; that doesn't mean you should ever use or support it.

0: https://www.iso.org/standard/28805.html

>used by one company

Samsung have started changing over as well, it's the default on their latest phones.