md-datepicker: add md-timepicker and md-datetimepicker...

[stefan-niedermann]

... or provide options like .

[arlowhite]

Just my 2 cents on time input since I've been thinking about it. (in the context of mobile in particular)

HTML has a time type. It is up to the browser/OS what UI to show.

<input type="time">

Firefox

Doesn't do anything special if I remember right.

Chrome

Has a nice UI and formats the time as you type with a colon. It also provides an AM/PM selector.

Problems:

• There's an X that looks like it would clear, but does nothing.
• The spinner buttons are too small for desktop.
• The initial focusing click changes the selected field instead of always selecting hours first!
  • Even with a blank input, if you click toward the right of the input, AM/PM is selected first.

Android 4

Android 4 has 3 spinners (+- on each) with buttons: Set, Clear, Cancel

Problems:

Personally I hate this UI. It takes way too many clicks to change values. For example to retype minutes:

1. click minutes
2. text is not auto-selected, so probably need to click again to get cursor on the right-side
3. Backspace, backspace
4. Type numbers

In my opinion spinners for choosing a number are overly awkward.

Android 5

New analog clock style.

Problems:

• Animations between hours and minutes slows down input
• Selecting minutes requires high precision. i.e. 00 vs 59 vs 01

Recommendation

I think Desktop and Mobile need to be done differently. In Desktop, you may have users with their hand on the mouse that want to set the time with the mouse only. Dojo and ExtJS just have a dropdown list of times. Somewhere I came across a UI that had all hours and all minutes (by 5's) in a dropdown that was interesting. (So it's just one click for hour and one click for minutes).

Mobile recommendation

My favorite UI, at least for mobile, is what is provided by Android Clock when you create an alarm. Just punch numbers on the keyboard and it does the right thing.

I think the same thing could be done by using

<input type="number">

Though it won't be as nice as the Clock Alarm time input, it gives you a number keyboard on mobile.

Then you can just punch in 8, 3, 0, click AM/PM toggle and that's it.

[jelbourn]

A time selection component is on our radar but isn't planned for the near future.

[stefan-niedermann]

@jelbourn if this is still an issue which is planned to be fixed - why closing it then?

[jelbourn]

Because it's not happening any time soon.

[mprentic-harris]

This would indeed be nice to have and seemed to be part of #648. But that issue was closed with just the datepicker. A timepicker is very useful, but it is a very large amount of work. It's understandable to not be in 1.0, but seems like it should at least be on the roadmap post-1.0.

[AndrewEastwood]

any chance to get md-timepicker ?