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Comment by koala_man | Hacker News Reader

To me, the time of day is four digits counting up.

The Android version of this instead makes me choose two points on three concentric circles (am+pm+minutes). It's neither helpful, useful, nor familiar.

If someone wanted you to enter phone numbers this way to mimic rotary dials, they would be laughed out of the room.

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I completely agree. I'm not sure if there is a word for this, but I think of it as "design should match the way your brain says it". I.e. may brain says "6:15 AM", and I imagine that in my head exactly how I write it, not some weird combination of circular dials. In fact, when I see those weird combinations of circular dials on the Android clock I always feel like I need to "translate" between my mental vision of seeing "6:15 AM" and rotating an unintuitive dial.

Might be an age thing, but the circular dial is completely intuitive if you've learned how to read an analog clock at a young age.

Unlike the widget described in the article, it doesn't snap in 5 minute increments for the minutes, which makes it a bit more finnicky, but otherwise 6:15 am is just a tap at 6 (south) and 15 (east).

The Android widget is a huge design fail. If you accidentally touch the wrong hour, or get into PM instead of AM, you have no way to correct. It became bearable to use once I forced myself to always swipe the hours and minutes until it read the right value, and to lift the finger then.

It's still not as bad as the Samsung and iOS vertical dial with 60 options, though.

My old Symbian phone (pre touch) allowed to just type the desired alarm time on the keyboard. I could blindly set an alarm. Those were the times...

I just tried it again on Android 9 (Pie), and as you say, it's definitely crappier if you're using AM/PM (my local settings have it on 24 hour time display), since there's an extra tap required for AM/PM and one could miss it and set an alarm for 6 PM instead of 6 AM. This may be more intuitive to someone used to a 12 hour locale.

That being said, in the alarm clock dialog, if you add a new alarm, there's a button that allows the user to type in the time using a keyboard (there's a keyboard icon to the bottom left), the first tap allows you to select the hour (shows both 0-12 and 13-23 if the locale is set to 24 hour clock), another tap will select the minute. If you're on 12 hour clock, you may need to change between AM/PM by tapping it. Tapping either the minute or the hour will allow changing that value.

Other than having the 5 minute snap on tap (as TFA points out, who really wants an alarm at 6:01 or 5:59?), it seems as if it allows all possible interactions, where the user can pick whatever input modality they want.

I have learned how to read an analog clock at young age, since that's all we had - even wristwatches were a luxury. But it's still much easier to set the alarm on a digital clock.

As my sibling commenter wrote, what your brain thinks is how it works may differ to how others' brains think it should be (e.g. older people used to analog clocks).

It would be neat if the system could offer a choice of UIs. On the same topic, one thing I really hate about Android's calendar is if you want to add an appointment e.g. 6 months in the future, you'd have to scroll through 6 months. I figured the fastest way for me to add things is to say "OK Google, add an appointment on (date) at (time)".

You can tap on the title of the widget to get into the month / year selection. It doesn't exactly help discoverability that it looks like a title and not like a button.

I do have to say, this way of the N9 is really efficient and quick. I use it on my Jolla 1 phone, and you dial to the hour, and to the minute. Just two press/swipe actions. Not 20 up-up-up presses.

The circular thumb rotation is pretty quick for picking, think of an ipod wheel.

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