opinion - Nafcom's Personal Site

As a product and software tester myself, I am aware that products have bugs. Apple is not left out of this problem.

It all started in 2017 when I got myself an Apple Watch Series 1. 4 weeks into using the Apple Watch, I noticed that the feature to auto unlock my Apple Watch when I put it on in the morning and lift my arm and turn my wrist, no longer worked. So instead of my notifications, it would ask everytime to unlock my watch, which meant I would miss all notifications which is kind of bad as this is the whole purpose of having a smartwatch. I have tried 3 weeks in resolving this issue together with support after initally sending a bug report. Mind you, no solution was ever found.

So 4 weeks into the problem I lost my temper and patience and decided to resolve it by totally disabling the feature totally. I knew since it was a problem the day I did after applying the latest WatchOS that it must be a software issue, not a hardware issue.

Disabling fixed it in the way that I had to enter the pincode of my Apple Watch to unlock it for the whole day. And each time I received a notification vibration, I tapped the screen and it would light up and show the notification.

Now let’s step into my momentary problem with iOS 13, since day 1 of the update, I ran into massive problems with the iPhone Mail app. I explained this to Apple support yesterday the following way:

Hi there. I Reported bug in support chat 100912882154 on sept29th: What happens since the first release of iOS13 is, that emails that are received and have the same recipient and sender email address, are now displayed in the receive AND the Sent mail folder in the iPhone email app. Which is a huge problem, since almost all Internet-of-Things-devices that send status reports via emails out, do not allow to set sender email address, only recipient email addresses.

I was given https://support.apple.com/HT207132 as a work around which is of course BS as this does not solve my problem AT ALL!

With iOS 12 and below, emails from my devices where only appearing in the received mail folder (aka Inbox) AND NOT as unread emails in the Sent Mail folder as well!
Please fix this issue ASAP!

The response from the Apple Supporter for Apple Germany (I know they sit in Ireland) was, that the dev team who does bug hunting sits in the Apple HQ in the US and they cannot communicate with them at all (I was asked in the chat support conversation in September, to report the bug via the form https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html which of course I did! At the time of writing this, we are now at iOS 13.2.2 and nothing has been done about the different and nasty Mail App behavior. I have the same email address and setup since I first used an iPhone 3g in June 2008!
And unfortunately network devices do not allow you to setup a different sender address than the recipient, so both FROM and TO email addresses are always equal.

Whoever decided to change the behavior in iOS 13 did not take this into account.

Also, the filter suggested is not possible to set, even if it was, it would only change what would display in the iPhone Mail App once enabled via a toggle switch, but the dupe emails would still be stored on the IMAP mail server, stuffing up my email quota for no use.

Also, since AOL Mail does not support advanced filtering like GMail does, there is no solution here.

When I asked the supporter that I don’t want the bug report to be ignored and the bug fixed as it happened with my Apple Watch bug, he said if I think he lies to me, I can ask to talk to his supervisor. Not helpful at all. I ended the chat session then. No need to talk to an uneasy supporter who goes into the rude tendency.

It will probably be like in the Apple Watch case, it will either be fixed with iOS 14 or never at all.

So, I implemented a workaround in Opera Mail, with a filter and every couple of days, I would delete the emails falling under the filter.

Now you wonder, what happened with my Apple Watch bug that I reported 3 years ago? They fixed the problem by simply removing the feature from the Watch altogether! when they released WatchOS 6.1 for the Apple Watch Series 1 😀

Short answer: No!

And here my long answer: I have read a lot of reviews, I have seen a lot of YouTube videos that reviewed the game. I am also aware of the review of Gamespot who gave it a 2 of 10 and also IGN Romania who gave it a 9 of 10 refering to it as “amazing”.

So what’s the truth and why the discrepancy?

Well, first of all, it’s interesting to see different standpoints of the reviewer. While IGN Romania explains he started out with the SNES and was always a fan boy of Duke Nukem and he loves Shelly being like him and the game really action packed and adventurous while the GameSpot reviewer mainly focuses on dull story writing, bugs and glitches, etc.

Even if you look at Steam reviews and youtube reviews, most negative ones rely on press previews. I honestly bought the game 1 day after release and after the 1st day patch that was automatically applied, I found no show stopper bugs that would crash my game during playing.

In contrast to other “The Crew Wild Run” who crashed on me constantly. I wrote UbiSoft this and now 3 weeks later, I still got no statement from Ubi Support. Too bad. They released a patch a few days ago which makes the game more stable, let’s hope it won’t suddenly crash again.

Having seen a lot of Previews, videos and such I was well aware what kind of a game I would expect. A Diablo with way less RPG (I really don’t like RPGs) and more action and bad-ass attitude.

It’s surely a good game, and I didn’t feel bored or something at all and it’s one of such games I am playing regularly at the moment. It’s also to turn out, press didn’t like the unbalanced difficulty but personally I have had no problems with that. I am an vintage game player, and I generally suck at them (except racing games and some adventure games, yes and I have played through the relatively easy Star Fox 2 on the SNES recently 🙂 ) but what everybody forgets, I am used to old games from the C64, NES or from the arcades being rock bottom hard!

Also, some may wonder, but yes I actually buy every game I play. We receive steam codes now and then for review, but personally I prefer owning the paid boxed version (if available) 🙂

So ergo, the game is really cool, if you take into account that it isn’t what some of you had expected. But the previews may it be playable or not where pretty much showing what you could expect from the final product. I am not disappointed at all and for me on Day 2 it had no show stopper unlike The Crew Wild Run and Batman Arkham Knight, which took me 6 months until I could start the game and another month till the graphic glitches were fully removed!

Here is our latest interview with 3D Realms and we are talking a lot about Bombshell as well:

So feel free to purchase the game, it’s really worth it! And I think best bet for 3D Realms would be focusing with that game on the retro magazines. Maybe those reviewers – just like IGN Romania – will more likely find what they were looking for in a kick-ass action game

Bombshell on Steam

Bombshell on GOG

Q & A with 3D Realm on GOG

GOGCast#5 with 3D Realms

Our podcast episode with 3D Realms