Activity Tracking and Airplanes ⇥ openradar.appspot.com

Craig Hockenberry filed a bug report regarding the handling of activity streaks across the International Date Line:

Expected Results:

My move streak (379 days) should be intact. I should also see accurate results for my activity.

You’re measuring my body, not some arbitrary position and point in time.

Actual Results:

There is no way to meet your goals for the day you missed. And that breaks streaks.

I also experienced this when I went westward over the date line. And, in a similar vein, I typically register 1–3 hours towards my stand goal before my early morning bedtime. That doesn’t seem right to me — in my head, those hours should be applied to the prior day’s activity tracking.

Computer-centric units ought to be converted to human-perceived elements wherever possible. Siri already helps resolve this in some ways: in the wee hours of the morning, when you ask it to remind you of something “tomorrow”, it clarifies whether you meant later in that date or the next day.

But instant messaging software and email clients, for example, tend to resolve threads from one contact as separate conversations if they involve multiple phone numbers or email addresses. In a contact card, a phone number still requires country code to dial from outside that country, even when the contact’s address is present. In all cases, we’re just trying to contact people, not numbers or addresses.

And it’s a similar kind of thing in Hockenberry’s bug report: my devices know that I’m in a different time zone with a different date, and they also know the amount of time that has elapsed. There ought to be a way to resolve this for the units we perceive, not the units that are hard-coded.