LogInThe time is finite.
I am inviting you to fall into the rabbit hole of what seems to be quite simple but is actually surprisingly complicated: clocks on iOS. An X/Twitter user known as skydotcs made iPhone owners spend more time than ever in their alarm app with their discovery: its time picker is not circular, as one might expect, but is "just a really long list."
This means that there is an endpoint, and if you scroll long enough (which is really not that long), the app will stop at 4:39 PM.
Another Sky, SkyVelleity, dissected the app further and concluded that the app actually has 7 cells created to show the hours:
"Here, we have a clock picker in the middle, on the left, it shows each hour that actually has an active cell, and on the left, all of the "Cells" being used in the middle picker.
"When an hour is about to show up on the screen, it finds a spare "Cell", one that has just gone off-screen, and pops it back on the other side, changes the number it's showing, and voilà, magic endless scrolling."
This is called a TableView, but even with 7 cells, it's still not that simple: "Catch is, you still have to tell it how many items there are in the list, here I say "10,000", once you hit that limit, you get to the "end" of the list, and you realise it's not actually some fancy 3d circle spinner, it's just 7 little text boxes that get used over and over again," SkyVelleity shared.
You might wonder why the clock stops at 4:39, and curious minds have the answer: Apple apparently started the clock in the middle and added 999 hours and 999 minutes, according to ApoStructura's calculations:
Android users might find this design extra baffling with their circular-looking picker, but another user claims it will also stop if you complete 264 circles. I'm not going to check it, but if you do, share with us.
I'm no engineer, so I can't say why Apple didn't make the picker a simple circular list of numbers, but as some people agreed, if it were easy, it would have been done this way.
By the way, calendar picker ends as well: on April 18th, 10000:
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