So I'm not the only one.

It's not just limited to Safari. Any and every date picker that doesn't allow text input of the date is ridiculous, those of you that design these things that call yourselves designers should find a new career path, I recommend selling cologne out of your trunk at a gas station, and if you're involved in this blatant and hostile devolution of interface I hate your guts. This particular one is my number one hated trend in UX, by a high margin. It is the most absurd set of design decisions I have ever seen, I can't see how it would not be malicious, it shows disdain for your users and you should be ashamed of yourselves. Fix this one and then we can talk about the others.

Almost every date picker I've used is terrible. If you are reading this and are responsible for adding a datepicker, please, please, please do at least the following:

1. There should be a textbox allowing me to type a human-readable date/time (e.g. "monday 5pm" or "july 7, 2015").

2. The textbox should be selected and ready to type into as soon as the datepicker is opened

3. There should be a short list of previously-typed dates because often, for a given date in the UI, the same date is used multiple times in quick succession

4. There should be a typical month view with days of the week visible, in case I'm on mobile

5. The current date should be highlighted on the month view.

6. I should be able to pick the month and the year in at most two taps each (i.e. dropdown for each), no matter how far back in time I need to go.

Shameless plug: we recently implemented an exceptional date picker on momentcrm.com because of how frustrated we were with the default browser experience.

bradgessler

In my web apps, I make dates text boxes that can handle inputs like “next Thursday”, “Monday at 5p”, etc by running the inputs through https://github.com/mojombo/chronic

I like the idea of inputs being able to make sense of as wide of a variety or formats as possible.

For number inputs I’d like to build into Rails something that can handle basic math expressions. For example, a person can enter “120 / 2” in an input and get 60. This is useful for expense apps where you need to expense half of something.

If folks are interested, I can open source these bits. I’d like to expand them as much as possible to handle an even wider variety of inputs.