On the recent episode of Ham Radio Workbench, a host asked Andy about manually entering dates and times when recording QSOs that had been logged on paper. Andy talked about auto-populating the date from the previous entry, but there were open questions about how to handle the time part of the entry.
Here’s an idea for a clear and fast user experience for this. It’s pretty simple, so you may have already thought of it, but anyway: when entering a new QSO, the date can indeed reliably default to whatever the most recent date was – that’s unlikely to have changed if the user is bulk-entering a series of records. My suggestion is that when entering the time field, the value is initialized to the time of the previous QSO plus 1 minute. In that field, pressing the “+” key (which would never be needed as text in a time field) would add a minute to the displayed value; “-” would subtract a minute. So when entering a long list of QSOs, time entry is likely to be as simple as tabbing into the field and pressing “+” (or occasionally “-”, if two QSOs were during the same minute!) a couple of times.
I think this would work nicely, as “+” and “-” are often near the numeric keypad where one could easily enter a specific time value (four digits should be accepted without a colon for fast entry). And if there are a lot of QSOs to enter, they’re probably fairly close to each other in time, reducing the number of keystrokes.
For consistency, “+” and “-” could step the date forward and backward a day, too.
This would be a pretty minor tweak but a helpful addition for folks doing a lot of that manual entry.
Thanks for your consideration!