If you open the timer app on a Xiaomi phone, you can click on a recent time to set the timer. Here I click on “19:00” and get 13 minutes. Why? Because if you click “go” before their gee-whiz animation is finished, you get whatever time happened to be on the dial at the time you pressed the button. Like, all they had to do was just have the button set the timer. And God forbid you just want to type a number. Nope. You have to spin a dial. It’s literally easier to do this right, but they chose to make it suck because it has to look cool.
I am pretty sure spin dials constitute torture according to the Geneva convention and Cruel and Unusual Punishment according to the US Constitution.
I am particularly salty at the stupid spinners for year when you have to enter birth year. I am old enough that it takes a minute to scroll to my birth year, and every second of it I hate the person that decided spinners are a great UI. Entering a date by keyboard takes 10 seconds, and the spinners multiply that time without providing any advantage.
Those suck. Even worse are the calendars that force you to scroll by month (or hide the secret menu to pop up the year selection.)
Just let me enter a date!
I forgot about those! Enter birth day: pops up monthly calendar of January 2026, and you cry trying to figure out how to scroll back in time.
Oh it’s the same issue that google’s alarm or clock or whatever had. Because the time select dial had to actually move to the position you clicked it could do the same as here and select whatever it was on when you clicked okay.
Separating animations from the actual selector is just too hard I guess.
nice amateurs hour stuff
the animation is incredibly fast, even the Max timer to the shortest one, it took significant effort to press start before it finished
In SmartLife app the dial will need to hover toward the number slowly and have to stop, where the selected number then turn bold before it consider the number selected, else it will just select the previous number if you do it fast enough.
I wish I had a dial in SmartLife for my kettle instead of the slider bar. It’s very hard to pick the right temp, and it always drops the temp by 1F. Want 204F? Better pick 205F.
Also there’s two bars with no explanation. One is set_temp, the other is temp_boiling. Took me a bit to figure out that set_temp is to heat to a specific temp while temp_boiling is to heat to boiling and then cool to the value you set (minus 1F, ofc).
And on top of that, it’s not possible to start heating without at least a minimum 1h of heat time from the app. If you do it from the kettle directly it doesn’t do this at all, but the app defaults to 8h and you can drop it to 1h. For anything other than 212F, I use the app because the dial is bugging out and jumps all over randomly on temp.
