Personally, I can't think of a situation which calls for one of these potentially ambiguous sliders over, say, a checkbox. The imitation that the author is cri

Personally, I can't think of a situation which calls for one of these potentially ambiguous sliders over, say, a checkbox. The imitation that the author is critiquing is poorly designed in my eyes, but even the iOS original is a bit ambiguous to me. Is the label on the button that of the current state, or of the state that the switch would attain if pressed? It's the former in the iOS control, but I could definitely see people getting confused over that. On a different note, here's a screenshot of the same iOS slider in a different locale (posted in the comments on the article): http://d.pr/VHZF http://d.pr/VHZF. Maybe it's the fact that "|" and "O" aren't often used to mean "on" and "off" in my English locale, but that just looks unpleasing to me.