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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

Apple devices are full of dark patterns (to get you to enable "upload everything always to iCloud") and bad UX. Even super basic stuff like the alarm clock ("bedtime") has become a Rube Goldberg-esque nightmare, and good UX elements have been replaced with garbage in other places as well. For example, setting the time of an alarm requires you to drag in a 5x5 mm area for hour and minute, respectively. Not only is that a way too small area for a touch interface, but you are also not seeing what you are setting it to. Utter garbage.

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Wow, just looked at the new alarm clock in 14.3; it's insane.

But even before that it had UI issues. While I had no problems with it, a friend of mine, a seasoned UI and web specialist and Apple fanboy no less, couldn't for the life of him figure out how to set a basic alarm until I hinted "you need to press 'edit alarm' at the top"; he just didn't notice that option being there.

> For example, setting the time of an alarm requires you to drag in a 5x5 mm area for hour and minute, respectively.

The numeric keypad taking up the entire bottom half of the screen is what they’re expecting you to use. Providing that is why they switched to the new design. Dragging in the time box is just for some backward consistency; it’s not the intended interaction.

Oh, I didn’t even notice the UI change because for years I’ve been exclusively setting all my alarms with (Type to) Siri. If I add the Alarm shortcut to Control Center, would this numeric keyboard be faster? I wager it’d be more reliably/accurate than Siri

The worst thing is they have a great wakeup time picker (not a generic time picker) for the "Bedtime/Wake Up" feature. That this feature, a completely separate alarm clock logic, even exists is insane.

I use it but it’s really weird that there are two disconnected alarm clocks.

And the input for timers is yet another custom UI where you can’t enter the time with a numpad.

Yes, alarms are really fiddly.

My favourite bit of alarm related UX is that the “dismiss” button for alarms and timers are in opposite places.

Boo hoo. If it bothers you you can just type in the time, the large control got replaced by an enormous keyboard.

Come on, that’s neither helpful nor kind. The controls were larger in previous OSes, and now look like they violate Apple’s own 44pt minimum size target.

The large control you are talking about was replaced by a keyboard. The small control is completely optional.

Based on the downvotes flying around here, it looks like there are a lot of people who somehow haven’t noticed the keyboard.

Maybe Apple should have actually made the new tiny time display not scrollable so people would be forced to see the keyboard?

I am SO happy they did that. Choosing 4 digits by scrolling two pairs was a nice looking stupidest idea from the beginning. The fact that you had to wait for animation to complete didn’t help. And if you didn’t wait and hit “save”, it silently used a former value. I was late at least once because of that. I also had few predefined alarms to not deal with that crap too often.

I know many ways to improve an old control, and I believe Apple has a pile of folks smarter than me who did the same, but someone stubbornly retained that and that is a win that they finally gave up.

Not only that, the screen’s super-ugly. It looks like part of some “kitchen sink” demo of UI elements.

Glad it’s not just me annoyed every time I open that and am reminded how crap it is now.

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