With iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 Apple has redesigned much of the operating system. From the new widgets to the calendar display or the Finder sidebar, there are several new options for presenting information. One of them, of which I am also receiving several questions during my training, is the time selector .
See you at 1400
The time selector is that small section in which we enter the time of, for example, a Calendar event , an alarm in the Clock app, or a reminder alert. Until now, across the operating system we used a wheel system in which we slid the hour and also the minutes to select the time we wanted.
Now, with the arrival of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, the system is noticeably different. When we enter the date and time selector we can write the time directly using the keyboard, although if we prefer we can also slide to adjust. Let’s look at a simple example:
- We open the Remindersapp on our iPhone or iPad.
- We touch New reminderat the bottom of the screen.
- We press the “i” that appears on the right side of the new reminder.
- We activate Time.
So far we have reached where we are going to need to adjust the time , so let’s get to it:
- We play the big hour on a gray background.
- We use the keyboard to type the reminder time.
In this case, the first thing we will write is the hour and then the minutes. You don’t need to add a colon or anything similar. By four in the afternoon we will write 1600, by 9 in the morning we will write 900 .
Type, but also swipe
However, while we are looking at the numeric keyboard, that is, as long as the time frame on the screen is still selected, we can slide over it to adjust the values. The grace of this system is that we can slide independently for both the hour and the minutes , so if we have made a mistake when typing the time in the previous option or we simply want to adjust the time that we already see very slightly, we can do it very comfortably.
Of course, we have to take into account that the minutes will be adjusted in 5-minute intervals. Do we want to adjust them one by one? We can also. A simple double tap on the hour selector will allow us to slide the minute “wheel” in increments of one .
In the end, with the redesign of the time selector in iOS and iPadOS 14, Apple intends to offer us more ways to enter the value . At the same time, especially for apps that can later be ported to the Mac, it offers a much more consistent and coherent user experience with desktop computers.
