I don’t often rant here, but in this case i’ll make a spectacular exception! We could call this post: How not to treat your data. After a successful launch of the new Roskilde App yesterday, around midnight, emails start ticking in about errors in the music schedule. We immediately investigate and low and behold, somethings completely off with the dates we’re getting from the festival.
After some serious pondering and head-tilting-sideways it turns out that Roskilde Festival has a different way of interpreting dates. Yes, that’s right - apparently that’s up for discussion.
Take this concert to the right here. If you where to read that, you would be under the impression that M.I.A. would be rocking it out on Friday the 1st of July at 01:00. But if you showed up at that specific time, you’d have to wait another 24 hours. Because contrary to what the date implies she isn’t playing the night between thursday and friday, but the night between friday and saturday. Say what? That means for all us mortals living with the Gregorian Calendar, her real gig time is Saturday the 2nd of July.
Now imagine you get a whole feed with this frivolous approach to dates and you’ve got yourself a date-soup of stellar dimensions. Short story long, me and willi had to manually go through the music schedule and compare what we where seeing in our feed and what was being presented on the roskilde festival site. We finished up at around 3am last night and send an expedited update to Apple. Now we’ve got a few days of angry and confused emails ahead of us with people lamenting us about our erroneous schedule. Could we have checked before launching? Sure, but the fact is that 85% of the schedule is fine, it’s only the after midnight things that are affected, so it doesn’t jump in your face unless you’re a big Kitchie Kitchie Ke-Me-O or Deadmou5 fan.
Anyways, if anyone asks. Give them this link before they send us an email. The fix is in Apple’s hands now, hopefully it’ll arrive before the music starts playing and people start arriving early for their favorite concerts.
UPDATE: Version 2.1 is now available in the app store, should fix the schedule issues. Whew.
