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The time picker on the iPhone's alarm app isn't circular, it's just a long list
212 oidar 88 9/1/2025, 3:54:24 PM old.reddit.com ↗
For something that people use everyday, the iOS vertically-scrolling, fake-dial UI is just horrible in terms of usability and aesthetics, and I was glad when they added the ability to summon a numeric keypad with a single tap on the center dial.
The keypad input and interaction is extremely well thought out and efficient for setting the time.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER1a6jgW1Gs
Where I can, I just say "noon" and "midnight". 12-hour time is frustrating because of this 0 == 12 bullshit
It’s really not difficult, or are you doing that juvenile bit where derision masks the incompetence you admitted to?
Just remember A comes before P.
But on a related note, do you tell people you will meet at 16 or 22 o’clock? I guess if you speak some other language that strongly types time with “…Uhr”, “…Uur”, “kl.…” it makes sense that you might not notice a difference. We can just say 4 or 10 and no one is confused, based on context, that it does not mean in the middle of the night or next morning, unless of course it’s a morning related context.
It’s simply far more human oriented, just like the US Customary Measurement system is a human scale system because it was devised by humans for practical reasons and purposes, to work quickly and efficiently, not necessarily to a nanometer precision. The different systems can exist at the same time, your zealous mindset notwithstanding.
I guess it might all be computationally more efficient and better on battery life?
Discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19597253
Lol get out of my head
As a switcher to iPhone earlier this year, so many UI quirks drive me utterly bonkers. Can't stand these slow rotating dials, and for alarms specifically, I miss the confirmation that Android shows you "going off in 12 hours" or whatever, to make sure you didn't get the AM/PM or day of the week wrong.
But mostly, these numeric spinners are just terrible. In the Hilton app I have to put my kids ages all the time and it drives me crazy spinning the stupid little things to set their ages. Sigh.
I don't know how iOS got this reputation as magical and delightful and intuitive. I'm ready to go back to my Pixel, I think.
Most of that reputation comes from the days when iOS was simpler, more opinionated, and wasn’t shy about how it wasn’t trying to make everybody happy. As more and more functionality has been tacked on in attempt to appeal to a broader audience, it’s been chipped away at. There’s still some ways it’s nicer than Android in my personal opinion, but often it’s just as bad with a different set of papercuts.
There’s probably a hole in the market for a mobile OS that intentionally does less in a very polished way. A lot of people don’t need their phones to do even half the things they’ve become capable of.
EDIT: Just tested, yes it works.
It's shocking to me how many of their friends over for dinner (who are all on the "definitely not dumb" part of the distribution) either cannot read it at all or can read it only with obvious/significant difficulty.
Teach yourself and children how to read clocks, people!!!
On PalmOS there was the app BigClock [0][1], where tapping on the upper part of a digit would increment it and tapping on the lower part would decrement it. That way you could quickly and predictably select any time with a few precise taps, without needing to rely on visual feedback like you have to with bouncy scroll wheels.
[0] https://palmdb.net/app/bigclock
[1] http://www.gacel.de/bigclock/bigclock.htm
If you use the Sleep feature, instead of a plain alarm for an “alarm clock,” it has had this feature for quite a few years now. Any modification made to Sleep, which is manageable from within the same Alarm app, prompts to ask if you’d like to change your entire sleep schedule or just apply the modification (shut off, or reschedule) to the next one up.
There was a bug a week or so ago, where if you set a wind down schedule, and then updated iOS, it enabled itself.
Got woken up hours early, despite never using that feature.
You can skip the next alarm or change it when using a sleep schedule (special alarm for waking up, also support schedules for different waking hours depending on the day of the week; setup directly in the same location as any other alarms).
Back in the day the iPhone was notorious for messing up alarm timezones and failing to activate with DST changes… https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-01-03/alarm-failure-leaves-...
The limitation comes from the UIPickerView system level UI component. I have a similar "bug" in my app.
Product would probably raise this as a blocker after QA managed to scroll to the end. Who cares.
Also: I can't use the alarm app anymore now.
Speaking of practical solutions, right?
Sounds like junk code that's adding unnecessary complexity.
I have the Sharp Twin Bell, one of the higher end models at $12.63 from Walmart.
Hitting the out of place small gray button to turn the alarm off entirely is easy to do if you're slightly more awake.
If you turn snooze off in the alarm settings you can have a big orange Stop button in the middle like with timers.
But I understand this design was too helpful and is being removed in iOS 26 because the different looking buttons don't match and the most important thing for an alarm is that it look pretty.
Probably. But I wouldn't bet on it. I once borrowed a car that would glitch if you pressed the cruise control buttons too fast. Normally + and - buttons increase and decrease the speed by 1 km/h. But if you do it too fast, it sometimes eats the entry, and starts skipping one position. Eg. it would increase from 105 to 107, and decrease from 107 to 105. It was persistent until cruise control was turned entirely off and on again. Eh? Making that bug must have taken more effort than doing it correctly. I guess it must be populating linked lists of possible speeds, and then screwing up the links when clicking too fast? (that was Jeep Renegade)
All table- or list-like UI components across Apple's platforms work this way.
Tutorial for "UIPickerView - Loop the data" involves "simply create a picker view with a large enough number of repeating rows that the user will likely never reach the end".
I guess Apple didn't think OP would reach the end.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26063039/uipickerview-lo...
Sure, making a true circular list is easy enough both computationally and code-wise. Nevertheless, it's still something "weird" and "unusual", yet another thing that has to be tested and understood and debugged. A linear list is on the happy path, and the difference isn't going to matter for anyone in the real world.
I'd personally have made it circular anyway just for the sake of my inner sense of correctness, but making it linear and finite is, IMHO, a defensible engineering choice.
Just wondering how they determined the length was enough? Was it constrained by a datatype or just an assumption on user behavior?
I hate that I had to find that by accident.
It could be infinite in both directions. That's just a zipper or
The explanation said this could occur when the timer is set for the same number of minutes as the screen-lock setting. I suspect, however, it is more likely the screen-lock event and timer-end event occurring simultaneously since neither is deterministic.