Best GUI control(s) to describe a time range

Question

I need to let end users specify a time range, to be stored and used internally as a starting date/time and ending date/time. The range could be minutes or it could be days.

Answer 1

I am a fan of an old control I saw used WAY back in the 90's with Inventor (and later Open Inventor) on SGI machines (and then on PCs, etc): an infinite dial.

Some screenshots, a little on the small side, are here. Course, its been done on a variety of platforms since, including similar things on the iphone.

I think a date/time picker would work well with two dials, each representing an order of date/time magnitude. In ASCII art, with each dial between [square brackets] it might look like:

[20 Oct | 21 OCT | 22 Oct ] [11:15 .. 11:30 .. 11:45..]

or with 3:

[20 Oct | 21 OCT | 22 Oct ] [11 .. 12 .. 1pm] [12:31 .. 12:32 .. 12:33]

There are a number of variations you could try (vertical/horizontal, date/time, date/hour/minute, etc).

Dials, though somewhat rarely used, are a natural device for humans to interact with, and their infinite rotation option (unlike a slide which must always stop) suits dates/times well.

FWIW