
Lifting the lid on the iOS 7 UIPicker - theraven
http://blog.ittybittyapps.com/blog/2013/09/20/lifting-the-lid-on-ios-7s-uipicker/
======
nwh
It's another bit of the UI that has been shoved into being "flat", but the
metaphor is just lost. If you hadn't seen the iOS6 one it makes absolutely no
sense now. For more of this, see the Clock app with it's ridiculous circle
buttons and half a blank screen.

~~~
buro9
I shouldn't worry, you should try Android's time picker.

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...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SK2ljlhHiCU/UaiEjF1lhGI/AAAAAAABJqs/0uWv7oMxdG4/s640/android-
calendar-time-control-1.png)

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.

~~~
cheald
Which picker/app is that? Here's the time picker in the Clock app (for setting
alarms) on 4.3 (CM 10.2):

[http://i.imgur.com/KhhHul5.png](http://i.imgur.com/KhhHul5.png)

~~~
turing
It's the time picker in the Calendar app. It was introduced in May:
[http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/29/google-calendar-for-
andro...](http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/29/google-calendar-for-android-
update/)

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.

~~~
masklinn
> 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)

------
shurcooL
Oh man, and now even Apple has come to a point where it's taking things that
were done well and making them worse. So sad.

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.

~~~
devx
Scott Forestall must be laughing his ass off. His style may have been
"obsolete", but at least he did it right. The new UI is trying hard to be
"flatter", but it looks like it's done by an amateur.

~~~
camus
His style was never obsolete. Soon designers will reject all that flat fad
because of what it really is , hyped non sense that goes against basic
usability.Then all flat UIs will look obsolete.

------
RyanZAG
_> You’re also not able to tap the AM/PM or minute items to select them, which
is completely inconsistent because you can tap the day and hour items! WAT_

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.

~~~
10char
Hm, it's more likely that when you have a picker column with just a few
elements (like only "AM" & "PM"), the tap boundaries aren't adjusted to fill
the entire container.

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.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
He lists that as a separate bug, so it seems the drag targets are too small
and they don't respond to taps.

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.

------
soci
I believe the Date Picker is something Apple will fix for sure. It's just not
their style and culture to do things difficult for the user.

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?

------
m_mueller
There is one more thing bothering me: The touch areas are not visually
distinguishable. I was really surprised that touching just a little left of
the minutes will scroll the hours, even though there is no line between them
and there is a huge whitespace inbetween.

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.

~~~
Pxtl
I'm not an iOS user - has the date roll picker always been there? In WP7 (the
exemplar of flat design on a phone) it uses the roll-like UI but without the
3D object metaphor. The behavior is the same, but flat.

I'd rather just have a numpad, especially for time.

------
weavie
So, have Apple really cocked up this release, or is it just the bloggers going
to town whenever they find some flaw and hacker news loves it when people find
problems?

Am genuinely curious - I've boon obsoleted with my iPod 4 so can't find out
for myself..

~~~
potatolicious
A bit of both. It's a massive redesign, not all of it is well executed, and
there's substantial performance degradation in some parts. There are also a
larger than usual number of major bugs that shipped with the final.

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.

~~~
leoc
At a guess, this [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-09/apple-loses-
china-s...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-09/apple-loses-china-
smartphone-market-share-to-cheaper-models-1-.html) may have something to do
with the rushed job this time.

------
pearjuice
It is like they are deliberately pushing for features which require more
processing and rendering power so the previous hardware instances can be
rendered obsolete.

~~~
Steko
There was some speculation that this was part of their actual strategy for
differentiation e.g. the parallax animations.

------
theraven
The UIDatePicker has 322 subviews...

------
coldcode
I like many of the improvements in iOS7 but I always hated the old picker and
hate the new one even more now. Maybe it's a hard concept to get right.

------
dennis_vartan
The new picker looks nicer aesthetically, no doubt. But each time when setting
an alarm, I find that I have to mentally focus to figure out which number is
currently selected. Similar font sizes, similar colors, lack of negative
space, and now the selected number and the numbers directly above and below
are way too similar for comfort.

------
taspeotis
Date/time pickers seem to be hard to get right. Android's had its own problems
[1].

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/december-
conspicuousl...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/december-
conspicuously-missing-from-android-4-2s-people-app/)

~~~
masklinn
The issue here is that it's a serious step back, the previous picker worked
extremely well, and had worked extremely well since iOS1 IIRC.

~~~
kalleboo
While it looks cool, I personally find it WAY more efficient to just type in a
few numbers on a keypad than to scroll back and forth, whoops, overshot it,
scroll back...

~~~
masklinn
Thus completely missing the point.

------
bnejad
These sort of time pickers on both iPhone and Android(I have a HTC One X) are
really the opposite of user friendly for me. When choose a time I don't want
to scroll a wheel... Just let me type the numbers.

And by the way, the Reveal App looks super impressive.

------
eknkc
Usability aside, the view breakdown looks fantastic. I mean it can be overkill
but whatever, that wireframe view shows some engineering.

------
ksk
I think the space on the right allows you to scroll down a uiview if the
picker ends up being the bottom most UI control.

------
abalone
Super nitpicky. The huge improvement in this picker is that it's inline. The
previous one was modal. That's fantastic.

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.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Yeah, who gives a shit about usability when designing UI!?

~~~
abalone
You've got to be kidding. Going from modal to inline is a _huge leap forward_
in usability.

~~~
ceejayoz
It's _potentially_ a leap forward, if it's done right. This wasn't done right
- it's harder to use than the old version.

------
thom
I remember when people would submit bug reports about things, instead of
writing long blog posts about some philosophical strawman.

~~~
gurkendoktor
I thought the view hierarchies were very interesting. Writing a blog post is
completely orthogonal to submitting a bug. And how is it a philosophical
strawman?

------
lukeh
Moreover, Reveal: amazing.

