[dingaling]

> Any sensible time handling solution will truncate instead of rounding.

That doesn't really work for a countdown timer though since the last second would then display as zero, which is nonsense for 'time remaining'. You have to round up, always.

The Android 9 countdown works intuitively, it takes a second to decrement from 5 to 4 and sounds the alarm exactly at 0. You can't pause it at zero...

> Which is not to call apple's timer nonsensical.

It pretty much is, since the last 'second' takes more than a second to elapse.

[function_seven]

I'll rewrite parent's statement to apply to timers and stopwatches:

> Any sensible time handling solution will round off toward the starting value.

So a stopwatch won't display "1" until a full second has elapsed, and will look like this for five seconds: "0...1...2...3...4...5!"

A timer won't display "4" until a full second has elapsed, and will look like this: "5...4...3...2...1...0!"

In the stopwatch case, the display shows "0" for 0.999 s; in the timer case it'll show "1" for 0.999 s.

[combatentropy]

But this highlights the difference between the two devices, stopwatches and timers.

A stopwatch counts up. Therefore, it makes sense to use the floor (4.99 is still "4", not yet "5").

A timer counts down. Therefore, it makes sense to use the ceiling (3.01 is still "4", not yet "3").

In fact this was a turning point in the original article: "rounding down . . . makes a lot of sense when counting up. . . . But for a countdown timer, this is counterintuitive."

[function_seven]

Yup, that was my motivation for rewriting the parent statement. Abstracting away the type of counter and just saying, "show the number only when you crossed it" basically.

[combatentropy]

Sorry. First, I thought that you set out to contradict, rather than agree with, the person you replied to (since that is common). Then I was thrown off by your topic sentence, which seemed to lump together the two devices ("timers and stopwatches"). At this point, I think my reading accelerated to highway speeds and totally botched parsing the rest ;)