everything e-diotic

Not long ago Nike launched a new app for the iPhone to integrate with Nike+ their social site for runners.

The app looked very promising and it was only $2.99. The app utilizes the built in GPS, so you need to have a newer iPhone like 3 GS or 4.

The app has some really cool features like route maps, including a pace indicator on the map, visualized as a heat map.

It has customizable spoken feedback something the Nike+ app from Apple does not have.

In general the application holds a lot of potential and it is most certainly a welcome application comparing to the Apple application, which holds only back functionality.

The only major drawback, which is a bug with actually kills the app totally and makes it useless is it ability to synch with Nike+, which does not work. So I posted to the Nike+ forums requesting assistance.

If you look at the thread a lot of people was experiencing the issue, no particular pattern standing out.

A post to the forum about changing the clock from 12 hour to 24 hour representation got me thinking.

Being a computer programmer myself, I often see that bugs are related to one of the 3 E’s

• Execution
• Environment
• Encoding

In this case it would fall under the encoding category. What encoding covers all issue related to expectations and assumptions about data and it’s representation. I am not going to bore you with the details, but it is a beautiful example I am going to use for a presentation on application testing tomorrow, when I am doing a presentation for some fellow software developers.

Please note the 3Es is a term I am using, it is definition work in progress, so it is not a common term.

So I changed my International settings to ‘United States’ instead of ‘Denmark’ and it worked (post about it in the forum)

Here follows a graphical version of the guide to make the change.

Select settings on your iPhone:

Select ‘General’:

Select ‘International’:

Your ‘Region Format’ is probably something else. If it already says ‘United States’ you might have another issue, which is not fixed by this approach.

Changed to the ‘United States’ and go back to the Nike+ GPS app and try to synchronize again. It might takes several sync if you have more than one run, if seems to be in batches in the vicinity of 5 or so.

Happy sync’ing…