But that's not even half of it. I had a nice rsync script on termux that would back up my media to my local machine via rsync if I was on WiFi and connected to my local SSID. Like 20 lines including the logging. But I still haven't found a good way to do this with an iPhone. Best idiotic hack I've found is shortcuts were I ssh into the machine and then write the file if it doesn't already exist or dump it to /dev/null if it does. It's dumb that I'm mimicking rsync. It's dumb I have to dump to /dev/null. It's dumb I have to define a fixed number of videos and images. It's dumb I'm using shortcuts and can't just use a terminal emulator because all of them can't get access to my photos folder "for my protection". This is so much unnecessary complexity for what should be a trivial task and I can't even guarantee it gets all my media without crashing! This shit is driving me insane. If you wrote shortcuts I'd like to buy you a drink because I am absolute impressed with how terrible this app is. Like do you all program it blind? I just need to know
For something that people use everyday, the iOS vertically-scrolling, fake-dial UI is just horrible in terms of usability and aesthetics, and I was glad when they added the ability to summon a numeric keypad with a single tap on the center dial.
The keypad input and interaction is extremely well thought out and efficient for setting the time.
But what pisses me off the most is when I've talked to other engineers/programmers about this (or similar issues) they just dismiss me with things like "you're not holding it right", "okay, but what's the value?", or "is it really a big deal?" (Yes, it is a big deal that I set something and then it undid itself! Yes it's a big deal, that's why I'm fucking late and we're having this conversation!)
Like come on guys, we're being paid north of $100k/yr (most well above that) and you can't just take the time to fix things? Earn your wage. Take some pride. Push back against your manager or just fucking fix it if it's quick.
I swear, there's so much added complexity in these systems created by people proclaiming we need to keep it simple. What's simple about the alarm clock and timer clock having different interfaces yet are visually identical? What's simple about duplicated calendar events that could be hidden with a regex? What's simple about a system that can't find contacts with identical names, hiding the process for users to manually merging them, and adding a new birthday event when they finally succeed?! (This literally happened to me. My partner had 2 contacts in my phone, 3 birthdays, and when I merged I ended up with 4 and 3 I couldn't delete because they weren't associated with a contact...)
We're making software worse. The AI isn't replacing jobs because we're getting more productive, it's replacing jobs because we pushed the bar so fucking low I'm more impressed to see that the code isn't written in Perl or Brainfuck
I guess it might all be computationally more efficient and better on battery life?
Where I can, I just say "noon" and "midnight". 12-hour time is frustrating because of this 0 == 12 bullshit
Midday and midnight are points in time that have no duration -- as soon as they are observed they are passed, so midnight is 12am and midday is 12pm.
This is easier to visualise on an analogue clock with a continuous seconds hand. Although the hand sweeps past 12 it spends no time there.
Alternatively think of a digital clock with very high precision. While your ordinary clock will show 12:00pm at midday for a full minute, your high precision clock might be showing 12:00:00.0000001 -- indisputably "post meridiem".
Like throwing a ball up into air, there is no time where it is not either rising or falling, but there is a point where it transitions from one to the other.
So midday is 12:00pm. As soon as the moment has been observed it has passed, and you are now "post meridiem".
> There is no am/pm on the 12.
> it’s fairly easily to tell which of them you are at unless you are close to the poles
> we’ve managed to cope this long with them.
It’s really not difficult, or are you doing that juvenile bit where derision masks the incompetence you admitted to?
Just remember A comes before P.
But on a related note, do you tell people you will meet at 16 or 22 o’clock? I guess if you speak some other language that strongly types time with “…Uhr”, “…Uur”, “kl.…” it makes sense that you might not notice a difference. We can just say 4 or 10 and no one is confused, based on context, that it does not mean in the middle of the night or next morning, unless of course it’s a morning related context.
It’s simply far more human oriented, just like the US Customary Measurement system is a human scale system because it was devised by humans for practical reasons and purposes, to work quickly and efficiently, not necessarily to a nanometer precision. The different systems can exist at the same time, your zealous mindset notwithstanding.
We have Dinner at 6, not 18:00 (people would be frowning if you'd say 18:00 out loud there). In messages I think I'm one of the few that always says "16:15" because I just hate ambiguity. If context does not clarify enough people say "in the morning/afternoon/evening/night But (easily) arguably "context" is even worse than AM/PM! Though I can't remember this going wrong ever.
I remember as a kid looking at a digital clock and subtracting 2, then dropping the leading 1 to get a "feel" for the time. Nowadays I'm 24h native and don't like the ambiguity of 12 hr references.
I set al my clocks to 24 hr (unless they have arms).
So yeah, here we are, all cool with our "military time", ahum.
It's significantly easier to use a 24-hour clock and get rid of AM and PM. In fact, it's so easy to use 24 hours that I use it exclusively for my internal time, and I do commonly get confused by times like 12AM - is it day or night? It has a 12 instead of a 0, somewhat confusing.
I also refuse that the metric system is more difficult for human scale measurements. Ever since I switched, I have had a stronger fundamental connection to the units, and I can visualize the world better. It's significantly easier, and I would call it MORE human oriented.
Why is this stuff challenging, it feels like reddit over here. My point is that saying "we will meet at 4" is more human scale than "we will meet at 16" because it segments the context window into morning and afternoon for which most humans and situations do not require additional external context to put meaning to.
You'd be surprised but people in Europe also don't say "sixteen o'clock", they say "four" or "seven in the evening" if it is ambiguous. But at the same time the physical clocks and texts between people have completely clear and unambiguous time, one can understand it instantly. Why with British/USA time, when the clock is between 12 and 1, I always need to stop and analyze which of the bullshit time segments it is referencing, because of the wrong order of numbers, starting at 12, then going back to 1, then forward to 2 etc.
But when being less precise, we might say any of "half two this afternoon", "two thirty pm", or "fourteen thirty" depending on context.
As we do still use the 12 hour clock in less-formal situations, using an "oh" prefix for times before 1000 gives an extra point of disambiguation.
In France we just say "let's meet tomorrow at 8 hours" for example, to which the person has to ask something like "Wait, do you mean at 8 hours or 20 hours?"
It's usually obvious from the context, but not always.
Discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19597253
As a switcher to iPhone earlier this year, so many UI quirks drive me utterly bonkers. Can't stand these slow rotating dials, and for alarms specifically, I miss the confirmation that Android shows you "going off in 12 hours" or whatever, to make sure you didn't get the AM/PM or day of the week wrong.
But mostly, these numeric spinners are just terrible. In the Hilton app I have to put my kids ages all the time and it drives me crazy spinning the stupid little things to set their ages. Sigh.
I don't know how iOS got this reputation as magical and delightful and intuitive. I'm ready to go back to my Pixel, I think.
Most of that reputation comes from the days when iOS was simpler, more opinionated, and wasn’t shy about how it wasn’t trying to make everybody happy. As more and more functionality has been tacked on in attempt to appeal to a broader audience, it’s been chipped away at. There’s still some ways it’s nicer than Android in my personal opinion, but often it’s just as bad with a different set of papercuts.
There’s probably a hole in the market for a mobile OS that intentionally does less in a very polished way. A lot of people don’t need their phones to do even half the things they’ve become capable of.
EDIT: Just tested, yes it works.
I guess it "just works" and I'm holding it wrong
It's shocking to me how many of their friends over for dinner (who are all on the "definitely not dumb" part of the distribution) either cannot read it at all or can read it only with obvious/significant difficulty.
Teach yourself and children how to read clocks, people!!!
On PalmOS there was the app BigClock [0][1], where tapping on the upper part of a digit would increment it and tapping on the lower part would decrement it. That way you could quickly and predictably select any time with a few precise taps, without needing to rely on visual feedback like you have to with bouncy scroll wheels.
If you use the Sleep feature, instead of a plain alarm for an “alarm clock,” it has had this feature for quite a few years now. Any modification made to Sleep, which is manageable from within the same Alarm app, prompts to ask if you’d like to change your entire sleep schedule or just apply the modification (shut off, or reschedule) to the next one up.
There was a bug a week or so ago, where if you set a wind down schedule, and then updated iOS, it enabled itself.
Got woken up hours early, despite never using that feature.
You can skip the next alarm or change it when using a sleep schedule (special alarm for waking up, also support schedules for different waking hours depending on the day of the week; setup directly in the same location as any other alarms).
Tutorial for "UIPickerView - Loop the data" involves "simply create a picker view with a large enough number of repeating rows that the user will likely never reach the end".
I guess Apple didn't think OP would reach the end.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26063039/uipickerview-lo...
Back in the day the iPhone was notorious for messing up alarm timezones and failing to activate with DST changes… https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-01-03/alarm-failure-leaves-...
The limitation comes from the UIPickerView system level UI component. I have a similar "bug" in my app.
And the simplest solution at the UI level is to make it a finite list that cycles multiple times. And that simple impl required no updates over the years despite changes to the UI toolkit.
e.g. compare the HTML solution to one that is a virtualized JS infinite list. The HTML finite list solution is trivial while the infinite cycling one probably needs to be ported when you change frameworks (like move to SwiftUI).
Product would probably raise this as a blocker after QA managed to scroll to the end. Who cares.
Sure, making a true circular list is easy enough both computationally and code-wise. Nevertheless, it's still something "weird" and "unusual", yet another thing that has to be tested and understood and debugged. A linear list is on the happy path, and the difference isn't going to matter for anyone in the real world.
I'd personally have made it circular anyway just for the sake of my inner sense of correctness, but making it linear and finite is, IMHO, a defensible engineering choice.
Sounds like junk code that's adding unnecessary complexity.
I have the Sharp Twin Bell, one of the higher end models at $12.63 from Walmart.
Hitting the out of place small gray button to turn the alarm off entirely is easy to do if you're slightly more awake.
If you turn snooze off in the alarm settings you can have a big orange Stop button in the middle like with timers.
But I understand this design was too helpful and is being removed in iOS 26 because the different looking buttons don't match and the most important thing for an alarm is that it look pretty.
The explanation said this could occur when the timer is set for the same number of minutes as the screen-lock setting. I suspect, however, it is more likely the screen-lock event and timer-end event occurring simultaneously since neither is deterministic.
Reddit sucks.
Probably. But I wouldn't bet on it. I once borrowed a car that would glitch if you pressed the cruise control buttons too fast. Normally + and - buttons increase and decrease the speed by 1 km/h. But if you do it too fast, it sometimes eats the entry, and starts skipping one position. Eg. it would increase from 105 to 107, and decrease from 107 to 105. It was persistent until cruise control was turned entirely off and on again. Eh? Making that bug must have taken more effort than doing it correctly. I guess it must be populating linked lists of possible speeds, and then screwing up the links when clicking too fast? (that was Jeep Renegade)
All table- or list-like UI components across Apple's platforms work this way.
Also: I can't use the alarm app anymore now.
Just wondering how they determined the length was enough? Was it constrained by a datatype or just an assumption on user behavior?
I hate that I had to find that by accident.
It could be infinite in both directions. That's just a zipper or
([a], a, [a])