When a timer finishes, you get a large button at the top for Stop, and a smaller one at the bottom for Repeat. When an alarm goes off, the Stop button is the small one at the bottom, and the larger top button says Snooze. Very often I find myself repeating a timer instead of stopping it.
iPhone alarm control became so wrong that I stopped using the screen and snooze only via top physical button. I’m not sure, but feels like it wasn’t like that before some idiot decided to change the way alarm works for sleepy subconsciously-trained users. Curious how many $M net cost was put into this “design”.
(Googled it: there was no stop button in ios 5, only slide-to-stop, which you cannot do accidentally)
Like GP said:
> [...] which probably arose from the fact that I began designing on the Mac, so I was conditioned to Apple's "OK on the right" standard at an early age [...]
Your users most likely will have been conditioned, too. So, don't force them to adopt a different button layout just because "you decided otherwise". If you're developing for multiple platform, it might well be worth your time to ajust those options depending on the platform the application is running on (just like it's almost always better to use a native save/load dialog for files).
And, if you're arriving at that point, you might even consider including a configuration option for those poor souls who have to use the application on another platform at work than they do privately.
I think this is the right answer. Personally and anecdotally, I doubt it makes a noticeable difference which way they are, as long as they are that way everywhere. I will soon learn that "confirm/apply/proceed" is one way, and "back/cancel/revert" is the other way, whichever way those tend to be. Just make sure you don't flip on me.