The real nasty bug (or feature, not sure) in the alarm app is that you have to wait for the wheel to bounce and come to a stop before the AM/PM part "sticks". If you just swipe and click save, it will keep the previous setting and then your important 7am alarm stays as 7pm and you're late for work.
They can’t code menus properly any more either - in macOS, try selecting something like a time from the drop-down menus for a reminder (on the main list of the reminders app, not in the window for editing that particular reminder). Immediately after releasing the mouse button while the cursor is over the time you want, move it slightly up or down while the flash animation occurs - you have now selected a different time with no warning. Completely inconsistent with the way every other menu has worked on macOS since 1984.
Logged a bug years ago, but presumably they have better things to do.
Go try the shortcuts app. It is an absolute nightmare. Get a few blocks to fill up the screen and then put something at the end. Good luck... the work around I have is put a nothing block at the end.
But that's not even half of it. I had a nice rsync script on termux that would back up my media to my local machine via rsync if I was on WiFi and connected to my local SSID. Like 20 lines including the logging. But I still haven't found a good way to do this with an iPhone. Best idiotic hack I've found is shortcuts were I ssh into the machine and then write the file if it doesn't already exist or dump it to /dev/null if it does. It's dumb that I'm mimicking rsync. It's dumb I have to dump to /dev/null. It's dumb I have to define a fixed number of videos and images. It's dumb I'm using shortcuts and can't just use a terminal emulator because all of them can't get access to my photos folder "for my protection". This is so much unnecessary complexity for what should be a trivial task and I can't even guarantee it gets all my media without crashing! This shit is driving me insane. If you wrote shortcuts I'd like to buy you a drink because I am absolute impressed with how terrible this app is. Like do you all program it blind? I just need to know
That bug burned me a couple times before I switched to using 24-hour time exclusively on my devices.
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.
I once had to use a timesheet app that required scrolling around for all the times during the day. Timesheets are already horrendous, why compound that skin-crawling experience with such a horrendous UI? It was so hard for management to corral everyone to get the times entered that they went back to spreadsheets.
Switching from Android to iPhone caused lots of problems and this was one of the big ones.
But what pisses me off the most is when I've talked to other engineers/programmers about this (or similar issues) they just dismiss me with things like "you're not holding it right", "okay, but what's the value?", or "is it really a big deal?" (Yes, it is a big deal that I set something and then it undid itself! Yes it's a big deal, that's why I'm fucking late and we're having this conversation!)
Like come on guys, we're being paid north of $100k/yr (most well above that) and you can't just take the time to fix things? Earn your wage. Take some pride. Push back against your manager or just fucking fix it if it's quick.
I swear, there's so much added complexity in these systems created by people proclaiming we need to keep it simple. What's simple about the alarm clock and timer clock having different interfaces yet are visually identical? What's simple about duplicated calendar events that could be hidden with a regex? What's simple about a system that can't find contacts with identical names, hiding the process for users to manually merging them, and adding a new birthday event when they finally succeed?! (This literally happened to me. My partner had 2 contacts in my phone, 3 birthdays, and when I merged I ended up with 4 and 3 I couldn't delete because they weren't associated with a contact...)
We're making software worse. The AI isn't replacing jobs because we're getting more productive, it's replacing jobs because we pushed the bar so fucking low I'm more impressed to see that the code isn't written in Perl or Brainfuck
I wonder if that’s also related to a bug or buggy UX, where in iOS safari you have to wait for the website scroll momentum to stop before the bookmark button context menu from long-press will fire/appear.
I guess it might all be computationally more efficient and better on battery life?
That's why the sleep/wake up alarm exists. It's a really nice UI. You set your weekly schedule, and if you need to push your alarm back, it uses a circular clock UI showing you how much sleep you'll get.
I'm a bit confused by your comment. Are you saying OP is holding the phone wrong? Offering an alternative solution? Just making a comment about how it isn't an issue for you?
Not sure if it still exists, but a few years ago there was a bug that if an alarm was created using Siri, it wouldn’t make a noise at the set time. It would show as a switched on in the clock app, but wouldn’t actually do the one thing it was meant to do.
I can never remember if AM is After Midnight or After Midday or PM is Post Meridian or Post Midnight, or it's something like that, not to mention when 12:00 is... is it 12:00 or 0:00?. But ah well, I'm lucky to be in a place where we use 24h clocks (but hey, max we see is 23:59:59!) (unless they have arms). Btw, the iOS calendar is (was probably) also pretty "broken" [0]
You almost had me all confused with that much confused and wrong information.
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.
Google’s Clock app seems to do most of the things: sliders on main screen, circular time picker (though I’m not exactly a fan), and a toast notification with the time until the alarm fires. The only thing missing are the every day/never options.
One of the best features is that when you save the alarm you get a little toast (not a fully notification) "Alarm set for 9 hours and 22 minutes from now." It seems pretty silly, and can be a bit depressing when the number is less than 8h, but is the most obvious indicator when you set the time wrong.
The Android clock app is pretty solid and looks something like that.
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.
> 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.
I found switching to iPhone weird given there's different UX for setting alarm through health app, which is different from the alarm in the clock app, which is functionally different but nearly visually identical to the timer in the clock app.
While that's true, the numbers are still clearly readable and their position alongside a circle still makes a lot of sense. The alarm itself is also listed in digital time.
really? I admit I don't deal with many youngsters, but I never met anyone who can't read clocks with hands, I think they may teach it in primary school here. This is deeply surprising to me.
I wish that at least the minutes/seconds were short lists, so you can quickly go to 00 instead of always overshooting and having to go back.
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.
You get this on iOS by tapping on the selected time. However, it's still less convenient than the BigClock UI, because you have to enter the whole time instead of being able to just adjust individual digits.
The iOS clock app is so bad. Thank got we're getting AlarmKit in iOS 26 so people will finally be able to make custom ones. So many obvious features are missing, like a "keep my recurring alarm on, but skip it tomorrow" button (useful for when you don't want to wake up early on labor day), calendar-driven alarms, etc.
> like a "keep my recurring alarm on, but skip it tomorrow" button (useful for when you don't want to wake up early on labor day)
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.
> keep my recurring alarm on, but skip it tomorrow
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).
The time picker is implemented using a UIPickerView.
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.
they do kinda fake it already. If you switch to another app, then switch back to the Clock or Calendar apps, it’ll snap you back to the top of the list
It's written like this because making a circular, infinite list that repeats and recycles the same few components is awful to write, and "(0..60).times(50).flatten()" solves 99% of the problems with 1% of the effort.
Product would probably raise this as a blocker after QA managed to scroll to the end. Who cares.
I bet it just happened organically. Started as an A…Z list but then someone had to implement it so that it cycled.
And the simplest solution at the UI level is to make it a finite list that cycles multiple times. And that simple impl required no updates over the years despite changes to the UI toolkit.
e.g. compare the HTML solution to one that is a virtualized JS infinite list. The HTML finite list solution is trivial while the infinite cycling one probably needs to be ported when you change frameworks (like move to SwiftUI).
Am I the only one mildly surprised but not bothered by this implementation choice?
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.
Readit News
But that's not even half of it. I had a nice rsync script on termux that would back up my media to my local machine via rsync if I was on WiFi and connected to my local SSID. Like 20 lines including the logging. But I still haven't found a good way to do this with an iPhone. Best idiotic hack I've found is shortcuts were I ssh into the machine and then write the file if it doesn't already exist or dump it to /dev/null if it does. It's dumb that I'm mimicking rsync. It's dumb I have to dump to /dev/null. It's dumb I have to define a fixed number of videos and images. It's dumb I'm using shortcuts and can't just use a terminal emulator because all of them can't get access to my photos folder "for my protection". This is so much unnecessary complexity for what should be a trivial task and I can't even guarantee it gets all my media without crashing! This shit is driving me insane. If you wrote shortcuts I'd like to buy you a drink because I am absolute impressed with how terrible this app is. Like do you all program it blind? I just need to know
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.
But what pisses me off the most is when I've talked to other engineers/programmers about this (or similar issues) they just dismiss me with things like "you're not holding it right", "okay, but what's the value?", or "is it really a big deal?" (Yes, it is a big deal that I set something and then it undid itself! Yes it's a big deal, that's why I'm fucking late and we're having this conversation!)
Like come on guys, we're being paid north of $100k/yr (most well above that) and you can't just take the time to fix things? Earn your wage. Take some pride. Push back against your manager or just fucking fix it if it's quick.
I swear, there's so much added complexity in these systems created by people proclaiming we need to keep it simple. What's simple about the alarm clock and timer clock having different interfaces yet are visually identical? What's simple about duplicated calendar events that could be hidden with a regex? What's simple about a system that can't find contacts with identical names, hiding the process for users to manually merging them, and adding a new birthday event when they finally succeed?! (This literally happened to me. My partner had 2 contacts in my phone, 3 birthdays, and when I merged I ended up with 4 and 3 I couldn't delete because they weren't associated with a contact...)
We're making software worse. The AI isn't replacing jobs because we're getting more productive, it's replacing jobs because we pushed the bar so fucking low I'm more impressed to see that the code isn't written in Perl or Brainfuck
I guess it might all be computationally more efficient and better on battery life?
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER1a6jgW1Gs
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.
Dead Comment
Discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19597253
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.
I guess it "just works" and I'm holding it wrong
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
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).
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...
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-...
Product would probably raise this as a blocker after QA managed to scroll to the end. Who cares.
The limitation comes from the UIPickerView system level UI component. I have a similar "bug" in my app.
And the simplest solution at the UI level is to make it a finite list that cycles multiple times. And that simple impl required no updates over the years despite changes to the UI toolkit.
e.g. compare the HTML solution to one that is a virtualized JS infinite list. The HTML finite list solution is trivial while the infinite cycling one probably needs to be ported when you change frameworks (like move to SwiftUI).
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.