Lifting the lid on the iOS 7 UIPicker
blog.ittybittyapps.com
blog.ittybittyapps.com
Consider a generation not used to the analogue wrist-watch, and give them a clock face with an outer 24-hour clock and an inner 12 hour clock, and then ask the user to select time using the tip of their finger, on a small phone screen, on the inner or outer circle to the hour and minute that they wish.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SK2ljlhHiCU/UaiEjF1lhGI/AAAAAAABJq...
Oh, and that top bit... the time that most people would read and want to change? Yeah, that's just display. Tapping that does nothing useful, just flips the mode from hours to minutes but you can't change the time that way.
So: A modal interface, on a circular control, with small areas of touch, that you cannot navigate one-handed accurately, and that uses the least popular display of time.
I actually love that picker a lot. It's efficient when you use it with one hand it it's not nearly as confusing as the alarm clock one which would break down completely if you would have to target a specific date.
Personally, I rather like the new time picker and have never experienced any usability problems. Also, the appearance depends on your time settings; the inner circle the parent poster mentions only appears if you use 24-hour time.
Which is only the vast majority of the world (about half a dozen countries use 12h clocks as a standard in written form).
(as it turns out, that means the vast majority of the world won't give a fig about the AM/PM selector being broken, the touch targets are a much bigger issue)
The standard time picker is this one: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/controls/picker...
It may be because it was rushed and hopefully they'll address it, but seeing the UI principles violated so badly is just painful to see. It's not even debatable, because it's not consistent.
I like seeing progress and devices/software improve over time, so every time I see something get worse than a previous version is very upsetting.
When was there a time that Apple didn't do that ocassionally?
Even back at OS X 10.0, there were tons of nice OS 9 features that got lost in the transition.
If it proves to be a major pain point they'll address it. Could even happen in a minor update. Such is the beauty of software.
Uh oh, that is a major red flag that the code behind this picker is one terrible mess. It implies that the code used for the time part of the picker is completely separate from the code for the date part.
The bigger flag is how this wasn't picked up internally, given how prevalent UIDatePicker is in Apple's own apps. I'd be surprised if no one noticed, so am curious to see if this intentional and stays the same, or was truly accidental.
I had some trouble myself interacting with an iOS7 time picker but it was about confusion of how wide the active areas where.
I'm also dubious of the still skeomorphic toggle buttons. They look like something you could drag across to activate, but you need to start your drag on the toggle switch so they're basically buttons.
However, there's one major pain I got with the new UI I'd like to share. The new passcode lock screen is also much different than before, and this for me was a BIG problem at the beginning.
Surprisingly when I saw the passcode screen for the first time in iOS7 I absolutely forgot which was my code and therefore I could not unlock the phone. Try after try the phone puts it more difficult for you to enter new code combinations by not letting you try again after failed attempts. So I had an unusable phone for many hours in a row. I was in anger, how could I have forgot a that?
I discovered that the passcode code was something I had buried in my subconscious. Before the upgrade, I could type the code even when I was completely asleep at 3AM in the morning without even thinking, never failed in all this years.
Typing the code was a sort of reflex action for me. But the different lock screen UI made me absolutely impossible to perform it again. The code was not in my memory.
After several tries, and several hours, I met with my wife and she told me my own code so I could finally regain access to my phone.
Now the pin code is back to my memory and not my subconscious.
Anyone else had this sort of problem?
I'm thinking that whole roll picker doesn't fit into flat design at all, since it's depicting a 3D object, which is the very opposite of what flat design is about - whether you like it or not. I do think that flat design done right can look great whilr offering the same usability, but it's much harder to get right.
I'd rather just have a numpad, especially for time.
Am genuinely curious - I've boon obsoleted with my iPod 4 so can't find out for myself..
None of it is the-sky-is-falling material though. There are some bugs that will drive devs up the wall (especially when they end up getting fixed later and break the workarounds), and the lack of optimization in some components will put limits on their use, but nothing particularly game-ending.
In summary: not a disaster, but less polished in general than previous iOS releases at this stage.
Side note: I noticed this time that there was a lot less Apple engineer engagement on the dev forums. Couple that with the number of polish bugs (see: the Sloppy UI blog from yesterday) and you'd get the impression that the iOS team was stretched severely to get this out the door. Hope they're all getting some much-needed downtime.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/december-conspicuousl...
Who gives a shit you can't drag from below "PM" to scroll up? That's the worst you can say?
As for the view hierarchy, cool viz but is it actually slow on old devices? I doubt it. Even an old GPU should handle those transforms no problem since they're the only thing animating.
"huge leap" is quite the exaggeration given that such UI ideas well understood and are decades old. Most average programmers could create a similar iOS control over a lazy weekend.