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Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time

lukashermann.dev

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Re: Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time

#71

Post by gfxgirl »

withinboredom wrote: post #60
gfxgirl wrote: post #57

I'm I alone in thinking the new timer app UI sucks? The old app where it used a spinner to set an alerm time and where I had N alarms that I could edit was simple and easy to use. The new app where hour and minutes are separate text fields and where you can't edit an alarm you can only delete old ones and create new ones is utterly unintuitive to me and much slower and more error prone than the old one. Clicking in t…

I just ask Siri to "set an alarm for...", much less painful.

Asking siri is noisy, (people sleeping next to me).

Re: Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time

#72

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #44
londons_explore wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you pause it... In which case it rounds up...

Ah. I see that my Apple app does do that, but it's not my preference. I would much prefer "0 seconds remaining" to mean 0 to 0.5 seconds remaining, than any other possible case. I would find it much easier to parse. (Alternatively, please show more accuracy for this case, where it's likely relevant)

[deleted]

Re: Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time

#73

Post by dumpsterdiver »

jVinc wrote: post #53
notatoad wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Round half up is a reasonable thing to do with many data types, but it's not something that's typically done with time. Any sensible time handling solution will truncate instead of rounding. Which is not to call apple's timer nonsensical. I agree with the author that it's a nicer experience, but I think it's likely an intentional decision to make the display look better, not a consequence of naive rounding.

> Any sensible time handling solution will truncate instead of rounding. It's not a "handling of time" its just a display. And its extremely sensible to round to the nearest displayable number instead of rounding up or down, because this minimizes the error in the displayed number. And that's what you are interested in, conveying as accurately as possible what the current time is.

Agreed. This is a desktop widget display we're talking about here, not a log file entry.

Re: Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time

#74

Post by mrlambchop »

gfxgirl wrote: post #57

I'm I alone in thinking the new timer app UI sucks? The old app where it used a spinner to set an alerm time and where I had N alarms that I could edit was simple and easy to use. The new app where hour and minutes are separate text fields and where you can't edit an alarm you can only delete old ones and create new ones is utterly unintuitive to me and much slower and more error prone than the old one. Clicking in t…

YES! This is so irritating - I assumed I was just being blind to some amazing UX as I fat finger the smallest fields know to human kind trying to eek out a few more minutes before my first zoom call.

Re: Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time

#75

Post by notatoad »

jVinc wrote: post #53
notatoad wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Round half up is a reasonable thing to do with many data types, but it's not something that's typically done with time. Any sensible time handling solution will truncate instead of rounding. Which is not to call apple's timer nonsensical. I agree with the author that it's a nicer experience, but I think it's likely an intentional decision to make the display look better, not a consequence of naive rounding.

> Any sensible time handling solution will truncate instead of rounding. It's not a "handling of time" its just a display. And its extremely sensible to round to the nearest displayable number instead of rounding up or down, because this minimizes the error in the displayed number. And that's what you are interested in, conveying as accurately as possible what the current time is.

Again, I'm not trying to suggest anybody made a wrong choice here, just that they made an intentional decision.

Theres no way this is happening because somebody called math.round() without thinking, you don't round time and the developers who make apple's clock app know that. They made a conscious decision to have the timer work this way. You can disagree with whether they made the right choice, but I'm pretty sure they thought about it.

Re: Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time

#76

Post by hunter2_ »

cafeoh wrote: post #49

I've never seen something so confusing. I've been (and quite frankly still am) seriously considering this is a big prank that's going over my head. The author even mentions that because time goes up and countdowns go down, rounding down is confusing. Wouldn't the logical conclusion be that you needed to round up? Wouldn't rounding up be the most logical option ANYWAY? If someone counts me down, I expect them to say "…

> If someone counts me down, I expect them to say "5, 4, 3, 2, 1, GO", and I expect a timer to do the exact same thing.

"Exact same thing" isn't really possible here because the timer needs to show each integer for a duration of 1 second, while the spoken words each have a duration of much less than 1 second. So much less that they're really identifying a moment (perhaps the initial consonant, or the peak amplitude) rather than a window of time. This is why "go" is able to be intuitively anticipated accurately.

If the timer app flashed each number briefly, with no display for the vast majority of each second, then it could do the "exact same thing" as spoken English. Considering the transition from displaying one number to displaying the next as analogous to a spoken word is about as good as we'll get, in which case "1" ought to be displayed for one second immediately prior to "go" (don't display "0" for the last second and certainly not for a half second).

Re: Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time

#78

Post by gfxgirl »

withinboredom wrote: post #77
gfxgirl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking siri is noisy, (people sleeping next to me).

You can type to Siri, under the accessibility settings.

Typing "Hey Siri, set an alarm for 10am" doesn't sound remotely like an improvement over the old alarm UX.

Re: Why the iPhone Timer app displays a fake time

#80

Post by [deleted] »

notatoad wrote: post #21
mey wrote: post #10

Round half up is the typical expectation for most people in rounding to the nearest whole value. It isn't displaying a "fake" time, it's rounding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding#Round_half_up Edit: Note, Round Half Up != Round half away from zero but that isn't important for this scenario :D

Round half up is a reasonable thing to do with many data types, but it's not something that's typically done with time. Any sensible time handling solution will truncate instead of rounding. Which is not to call apple's timer nonsensical. I agree with the author that it's a nicer experience, but I think it's likely an intentional decision to make the display look better, not a consequence of naive rounding.

[deleted]
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