Alarm challenge!

krisse wrote:I'm just about to do an article about alarm apps, so can I have some tasks to challenge them with?

To start things off, I think one requirement mentioned on here was selecting a particular day of the week at a particular point in a month (for example the third tuesday of every month).

Any other things you want to do with an alarm but can't on the built-in S60 software?

- Obviously, repeating alarm to wake up in the morning (must ring only Mon-Fri). The built-in alarm app doesn't do that (although it looks like that's going to change with S60 3rd edition FP1) but every third party alarm app i've seen can do that.

- Multiple alarms.

- Ability to set the tone played when the alarm goes off as well as the volume (the built-in app does that).

- Must allow the user to choose whether or not the alarm should ring if the phone is on Silent profile.

- Alarm must ring even if the alarm application is not running on the phone (sounds obvious but, believe it or not, i did come across an alarm application for my E61 that would only ring if it was running).

- Snooze function. The built-in alarm app does it but, unless i've missed something, third party apps don't snooze which is very annoying.

- Must allow an alarm to be disabled without having to delete it altogether.

- must be cheap ($5 sounds ok). This is just an basic alarm application, not a full blown Office suite or 3D game.

- Must be called "Alarms" (or something equally obvious) and have an alarm clock icon. I don't want to spend ages scanning the menu to find it just because it's got a stupid name and irrelevant icon.

- And, of course, must be quick and easy to use. Must do alarms and alarms only, start instantly, use very little RAM (i don't want all my applications to shutdown whenever i want to set an alarm) and never require more than 1 or 2 clicks to set the time of an alarm or disable/enable it.

That would be my perfect alarm application.

Anyone with any other wishlists regarding the way their smartphone/PDA alarm works?

I'll be doing this article soon, so post your requests here if you do have any wishes. Hopefully some developers will take notice and do something closer to the perfect alarm.

Sometimes Alarm could be more aggressive: for example, when it has to wake me up. It often happens to me that I don't remember that I disabled an alarm while I was sleeping. It would be much harder for me, and more efficient for the alarm, if I had to e.g. type in a code or password in order to disable the alarm. Having to remember a secret code and type it in would entirely wake me up, I think.

Tote

Have you tried this one?

http://www.handango.com/ampp/store/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=1208&jid=B6E91FXX5267E4E6D227CF964E5C9294&platformId=4&productType=2&catalog=0&sectionId=0&productId=189432

That's easy: everything the good old Psion 5/5mx, etc. could do 😉 - possibly the best out-of-the-box calendar system ever.

• Alarm tone settable on a per-entry basis
• different defaults for calendar / to-do / other alarms
• the ability to search between two dates (e.g. find out how much leave I've taken this year) [I really miss this]
• categorisation of calendar / to-do entries
• probably loads of other things that I took for granted and can't even remember now

Synchronisation with NON-Microsoft calendars, e.g. gCal, Yahoo, etc. WITHOUT going anywhere near Outlook!

The ability to set the snooze time on an alarm when actually snoozing it (anything from a minute to a week ... and let me set my own as well as choosing from standard pre-sets - I might want to snooze something until I get home, or to work, or 2-and-a-bit days' time when I'm going shopping).

Also, the ability to re-set a repeating To-Do based on when it was last done.
e.g. my dog should be wormed every three months, but if I don't do it in time, I'd like the next reminder to be based on when I DID last worm her, not when I SHOULD have (i.e. a once every 3 months alarm wouldn't be appropriate)
Similar examples might be car servicing, dental checkups, etc.

Julie

... and on the "3rd Monday of the month" theme, also "last day of the month"

I work in a lab and often have several stopwatches going at once, counting upwards from 0 to 4 hours, with time points at (for instance) 15', 30', 1h, 2h and 4h. Imagine six of these at staggered intervals. I have to use a spreadsheet to figure out when I can take lunch.

It would be lovely to have all of these alarms on the phone so I can drop what I'm doing and go take a time point. It would be lovelier still if I could set the phone up to vibrate, so if I'm on the phone or in a meeting I can excuse myself quietly.

I'm looking at programming HanDBase to do this but haven't got it working to my satisfaction yet. I'm very curious to know what's out there as the Nokia built-in alarm is woefully inadequate (not to mention that its lone alarm must be restarted each time from scratch, and it doesn't do timer or stopwatch). HandyAlarm looks intriguing, but I'm not going to spend the money to purchase software for which I haven't seen a satisfactorily complete review (yet) and which might not meet my needs. (I don't need to replace the spreadsheet, but I might need a heads-up to come back from lunch.)

Looking forward very much to what you come up with.

--Tom

I need an intelligent alarm clock that will use every trick in the book to get me out of bed:

- Start off with the normal signal, but as I tend to get immune to it after a while, try with some new real time generated signals with varied volume, frequency and tempo to trick my tired brain to react. Subliminal messages might work, too.

- Support a bluetooth connected lamp that will gradually become brighter and shine into my face.

- Give me the wrong time as a last resort (say, 40 minutes ahead), so that I'm tricked to believe that I will be late.

also, preemtive measurements like:

- based on prior knowledge of my sleep habits, remind me when to go to bed in time at night.

- present colorful graphs showing me exactly how tired I will be the next day and exactly how much my productivity will suffer from the lack of sleep

I suggest the appropriate name should be "Mother 2.0".

This is great! Thanks for all the feedback everyone!

Bear in mind though, I'm just looking at alarms, not calendars in general (although obviously the alarm features of calendars do count as alarms). Calendars are a much larger topic. The article will just be about things that wake you up or remind you about something using sound or vibration or flashing lights.

And are there such things as bluetooth lamps? 😊

juwlz wrote:Also, the ability to re-set a repeating To-Do based on when it was last done.
e.g. my dog should be wormed every three months, but if I don't do it in time, I'd like the next reminder to be based on when I DID last worm her, not when I SHOULD have (i.e. a once every 3 months alarm wouldn't be appropriate)
Similar examples might be car servicing, dental checkups, etc.

I'm not quite sure what you want the alarm to do.

If you need to worm your dog every three months and you fail to do it within three months of the last worming, how often should it remind you about that fact? Every day until you get it done? A sort of nag-you-until-you-do-it kind of thing? 😊

krisse wrote:This is great! Thanks for all the feedback everyone!

Bear in mind though, I'm just looking at alarms, ...

I'm not quite sure what you want the alarm to do.

If you need to worm your dog every three months and you fail to do it within three months of the last worming, how often should it remind you about that fact? Every day until you get it done? A sort of nag-you-until-you-do-it kind of thing? 😊

Yes - an alarm should keep nagging me until I tell it I've done what it was nagging me to do (with settable snooze intervals, of course). What I was thinking about was a ToDo that gets re-set for 3 months from today, once I tick off the current task to say I've finally done it! So outside the scope of your article, obviously.

Julie

I would like an alarm to have a "vibrate only" setting. I want to get up early to go for a run but I don't want the alarm to wake my wife. If on vibrate I can strap it to my arm and slide out of bed as quietly as possible!

Not sure if this is where I post this but I miss a couple basic functions that my previous Nokia phones used to have. One of the big ones is that I miss being able to set my alarm for a specific time in the morning and if I wake up for whatever reason some time before it's scheduled to go off and turn the phone on I do NOT want the alarm to go off early.

So, as an example let's say I have a hard time getting to sleep and decide to reset my alarm to 10:00am allowing me to get a full 8hrs of sleep. I normally would wake up earlier so when my body naturally wakes up I want to turn my phone on in case someone attempts to call or reach me at a time when I would normally be awake. I then want to go back to sleep and try to get a full 8hrs of sleep assuming nobody needs something pressing. The key here is that in order for me to sleep after I wake up I MUST return to sleep immediately or else I'm awake for the day. With my other Nokia phones I can reach over and power it on and go back to sleep and the alarm still goes off at the designated time. With my e70 though, the alarm goes off as soon as the phone boots up and I'm forced to disable it and reset it. By the time I wait for the phone to go through it's boot sequence, stop the alarm and then navigate my way through the menu to set the exact same time valuable getting back to sleep time has been lost.

I guess I don't understand why the alarm now does that and it makes no sense to me why someone would have thought that having an alarm go off prior to a designated time was more useful somehow.

So, unless I'm missing a setting somewhere, this is a basic feature of my alarm that I miss from my 6822, 6820, 6800... phones.

Okay, I'll be doing this article next, so thank you for all the suggestions. I'll try and incorporate as many of them as I can into the article, and hopefully people from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, third party software developers etc will take notice.

Are you a hobbit krisse?

Elevensies?

Sorry I missed this thread before the article was written otherwise I'd have chipped in with my comments.

Nice article, I notice no ticks in the "Alter Snooze Length" boxes for any of the apps which is an essential for me.

I want to snooze for 10 mins like I did with my 6230i but my N73's default is set to 5 mins which is too short and I can't alter it.

I believe the most promising app for my need is "Time Machine" by Chitale Enterprises, however its not available for N73 yet - but I'm told it will be soon.

rgds
Chris

jeremyhelling wrote:Not sure if this is where I post this but I miss a couple basic functions that my previous Nokia phones used to have. One of the big ones is that I miss being able to set my alarm for a specific time in the morning and if I wake up for whatever reason some time before it's scheduled to go off and turn the phone on I do NOT want the alarm to go off early.

So, as an example let's say I have a hard time getting to sleep and decide to reset my alarm to 10:00am allowing me to get a full 8hrs of sleep. I normally would wake up earlier so when my body naturally wakes up I want to turn my phone on in case someone attempts to call or reach me at a time when I would normally be awake. I then want to go back to sleep and try to get a full 8hrs of sleep assuming nobody needs something pressing. The key here is that in order for me to sleep after I wake up I MUST return to sleep immediately or else I'm awake for the day. With my other Nokia phones I can reach over and power it on and go back to sleep and the alarm still goes off at the designated time. With my e70 though, the alarm goes off as soon as the phone boots up and I'm forced to disable it and reset it. By the time I wait for the phone to go through it's boot sequence, stop the alarm and then navigate my way through the menu to set the exact same time valuable getting back to sleep time has been lost.

I guess I don't understand why the alarm now does that and it makes no sense to me why someone would have thought that having an alarm go off prior to a designated time was more useful somehow.

So, unless I'm missing a setting somewhere, this is a basic feature of my alarm that I miss from my 6822, 6820, 6800... phones.

I may have solved my problem and it may not have been a problem of the alarm but another glitch elsewhere in the phone. Here's the thread explaining the problem I found.

A small application, particularly focused on better snoozing experience can be found here: www.codsnip.net/snoozeme