Smartphones have long since replaced the egg timer in most households. But if you set a timer on the iPhone, the correct time will not be displayed there. However, there is a smart idea behind it.
It’s an extremely practical feature: if you want to get the eggs or pasta out of the water on time, you simply set a timer on your smartphone. The digital egg timer is likely to be one of the most common commands for the iPhone assistant Siri in everyday life. But if the timer then slowly counts down, it does not correctly display the elapsed time. But that’s not a mistake.
A few days ago, the German developer Lukas Hermann drew attention to the strange time behavior of the iPhone. He came across it while developing his app Stagetimer.io. The app allows you to automatically count down the time for an event. “If the countdown shows 5 seconds, you’d think there are 5 seconds left. But that’s not the whole truth,”.
With tricks for a natural sense of time
Because: “Strictly speaking, the iPhone does not display the correct elapsed time, but adds 500 milliseconds – or, in other words, half a second”, explains Hermann. This has a purpose: “It does this because it makes reading the time feel more intuitive for people.” The end of the timer is not affected by this, however, it always rings at the correct time, the developer emphasizes.
In an example, Hermann shows why Apple uses this trick. The problem: If you start a digital timer, for example to five seconds, it almost immediately jumps to 4 seconds – because less than five seconds remain. In return, however, it shows a 0 almost a full second before it expires. This is because the digital time display works differently than the analog one. Software like Javascript likes to use milliseconds and then just subtract 10 ms, explains Hermann. If you take a timer that shows tenths of a second, the difference is quickly clear: Instead of a 4, it first jumps to 4.9, the last second is not a solid 0 but runs down from 0.9, which is visible to humans.
But if you don’t want any decimal places, you have to use tricks. And that’s what Apple does, too, as Hermann discovered. By simply adding half a second, the time display is more “realistic” for humans. The iPhone watch will then simply show the start time for half a second before visibly counting down. At five seconds, the number 5 can be seen briefly before it changes to 4. To compensate, the 0 at the end is “abbreviated” – and can only be seen for half a second. So the start and the end feel more natural and less abrupt to humans. The timer itself counts exactly in the background.
Incidentally, the problem only exists when counting down, emphasizes Hermann. If you count up normally, you will not be surprised that you are starting from zero – and the delay in switching corresponds to your own sense of time.
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