Hacker News Reader

Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

  Multiple timers. Run several timers on iPhone simultaneously, perfect for when you’re cooking

and need to keep track of different steps and dishes.

Why was this so hard to implement? Or they just never felt like many people needed it? This has always seemed like a really basic missing feature. I'm surprised it took so long.

View on HN

It's the perfect "bottom of the backlog" feature. I doubt there's a dedicated Clock app team.

This is such a welcome addition! I totally agree: it likely took all of 30 minutes to implement (plus testing, QA, etc time).

I'd love to see another Clock feature: let me choose a new timer/alarm sound _without_ immediately previewing the sound. At this point I know a handful of my favorites that I like to choose from, and I don't want to hear them at full alarm volume just because I'm changing the noise. A preview button trailing-aligned in the list would be perfect spot for a quick way to listen to an alarm sound.

And a related feature: include Alert Tones (ie Messages alert sounds) in addition to Ringtones as timer/alarm noises.

Working on a very big but nowhere near as big or far reaching software project, even the most trivial changes take a long time end to end. The design review alone will have taken a long time at apple, without even starting to think about the technicals.

The iPad doesn't even have a native calculator app. The iOS calculator is not part of iPadOS. These kinds of 'basic features' can be really easy to ignore for the flashier stuff that people will potentially use less.

I wonder if they accommodated the issue where you use the timer to "stop playing" (like a sleep timer for Youtube Music) but then the next time you set a timer it's set to stop playing so it makes no noise if you forget to switch off of "stop playing" been bit a few times by that so i remember to switch but that's some pretty bad UX as it makes Siri useless for setting timers

Yes, it's now addressed.

In my view, it didn't make Siri useless for setting timers, it meant there was no universal sleep timer, as I refused to use the "Stop Playing" feature.

Timers can be managed via Siri. I’d guess that difficulty of adding that to the barely-working assistant was a blocker.

I've been bit by adding timers via Siri so many times because I use the timer as a sleep timer for youtube music. So the next day I go to set a timer with siri and its set to "stop playing" which makes no sound and therefore the timer is next to useless. :( So now I just set timers manually but it nullifies Siri.

happy to see this has been fixed in ios17. you can create a "sleep timer" and your siri timer will be created as a new timer with defaults.

Siri always thinks I'm saying "fifteen" when I'm saying "fifty". It's annoying because one dish I make often bakes for fifty minutes. At least Siri understands when I say "five zero minutes". I sound like I'm calling in an artillery strike on my kitchen.

Siri saying "Roger" to this is really the only correct response. :-)

It's weirder because the Apple Watch has been able to do it for a while now. I use it all the time.

Probably not a priority or they could not prioritize designing the UX

Ah. So that feature is why my alarms randomly stopped working for part of the beta.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com