4 ms·

Date pickers in general are terrible. Why on a form where I have type my email or shipping address can’t I also just type in a date ?

• jonahx 4y ago
  You can type the date in browser date pickers, including Safari's, even while the calendar is visible. But the UI is not superfluous for many use cases. Often, you want to see the whole calendar for context -- eg, to see the associated day of week.
  • comex 4y ago
    > You can type the date in browser date pickers, including Safari's, even while the calendar is visible. Not on iOS (at least assuming you don’t have a hardware keyboard). The software keyboard does not appear and there’s no option to bring it up.
• foolfoolz 4y ago
  date pickers are great for selecting recent dates such as this month or next month. this works very well for hotels and stuff like that where you select multiple dates. i would rather date picker than type it in
• CydeWeys 4y ago
  It depends on the use case. For something like birthday, ID expiration date, etc., just being able to type in the correct values is the best UI. But for a use case like scheduling something in the near future (e.g. a flight, delivery, whatever), the calendar picker is superior because days of the week actually matter for this use case.
• macinjosh 4y ago
  Exactly, a plain text field that does best effort parsing. If you want to be precise you can enter "2022-12-01", but if you are in the mood you can enter things like "tomorrow" or "first of the year", or "June 1 1999". UI could even show the exact parsed date below the field as a hint.
  • bruce511 4y ago
    I know it's not the fashion now, but the jQuery UI date picker works really well, can be configured for various situations And let's you type the date instead. I wrote code on the back-end to also parsing. So just type 11 for the 11th of this month, or 11/11 for 11 Nov this year. Or 11 Nov. Or next Tuesday. Or tomorrow of yesterday etc. It also only treats the screen format as a suggestion. Like it wants dd/mm/yyyy, you can type in 1945/12/6 and it'll figure it out. (it uses the suggested format to resolve ambiguities) Computers are good at this, and should do more if it. Don't get me started on Web sites that reject my credit card number because I type in hyphens or spaces. With specific messages like "enter the number as 16 digits, without spaces". WTF????
    • wruza 4y ago
      I love when these fields are also length-limited so when you paste your 19-chars it cuts the last three.
• ulfw 4y ago
  The best is to have both. Let customers type in a date and show it in a calendar below so people can confirm it's the date they're interested in. Let them tap on the calendar to correct it if needed.