Comment by sgentle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgentle | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely hate the list-of-custom-timer UIs on both iOS and Android. I can only assume that both companies have separately gone through the cycle of "people want favourite/recurring alarms" -> "timers are just alarms for relative time" -> "people want favourite/recurring timers".

The thing is, there just aren't that many times I want a timer for. Nobody's out here with a carefully curated gallery of artisanal durations. It takes me more time and effort to scroll to my 15-minute timer than it would to hit 1-5-enter on a numeric keypad.

Hell, even just a +1,+5,+10,+15 grid that starts immediately or adds to the current timer would cover everything I've ever needed within four taps. But, nope, gotta gallivant through my menagerie of exotic timers to pick out the perfect one. Infuriating.

It's a little embarrassing to admit, but timers ("hey siri, set a timer for 10 minutes") is the most common thing I use a voice assistant for. Works great, though.

Same. I use adhoc timers constantly!

You can save, err, time here

“Hey, Siri, 10 minutes” works fine

I’m theoretically a good candidate for the favorite timers, because I almost always choose one of 15 seconds, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 25 minutes, 40 minutes, or 1 hour.

Of course, the issue is that those are six different times, the LRU cache only has four slots, and the MRU timer is put on a separate screen but is only rarely the one I want.

My ideal would be either just punching in the numbers (it’s not that hard) or a fixed dashboard of N timers that I can manage myself, where the positions of the times never change.

My most used timer is pressing start on a 1 minute timer and then hitting +1 minute as many times as needed. It takes literally seconds to punch in just about anything less than 30 minutes.

The next artisanal timers I have are 30 minutes and one hour.

Those three timers cover 95% of my needs.

Good idea! Tactic adopted.

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