In my last post I talked about the hideous horrible problem with the alarm clock on the motorola razr. But know I'd like to talk about something else regarding cell phone alarms.
My girlfriend uses her cell phone to wake up every morning. Now, I have to go off on a tangent for a second to explain why she uses her cell phone. She doesn't have a Mac, first of all, so she can't use my application. She'll probably get a Mac when she gets a new computer, but she can't exactly afford to buy a computer right now. She has a regular alarm clock by her bed, and she doesn't use it. I asked her why once, and she told that it was too loud first of all. And second of all, the genious manufacturers put the tiny snooze button right next to the tiny stop button, so when she tries to hit snooze in her sleep, she ends up hitting the stop button half the time. Thus she uses her cell phone.
Now every night as we're lying in bed, I sit there and watch her set her alarm. She'll go to the alarm menu, and then she'll find the alarm named 'School'. She looks at it for a second, and then decides that she wants to use this alarm, but she's not sure what time it's set for. So she has to go into it's settings and double-check what time it is. Every night she double-checks it's time, even if she's not changing it from the night before. When I ask her why, she says that she feels more confident if she see's the actual alarm time. If she just sees the word 'School' she doesn't know if it 's set to let her sleep in, or get her up early, etc.
Now for the love of me, I don't know why she even uses a name for her alarms. She could save herself some time every single night, if she would just stop naming her alarms. But the fact that the alarm gives her the option of setting a name is enough to convince her that she should name them ALL...
Now I get a lot of feature requests for Alarm Clock 2. And one of the common requests is to name the alarms. This way when people click on the alarm clock icon, they can see a name for their alarm, and not simply the time. I have not implemented this feature. I hope this gives you an idea of why...
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5 comments:
Robbie, I love your application's interface and the simply elegant design. I have been playing with Alarm Clock Pro and Aurora and both have interesting features, but yours is by far the most simple and elegant. You are well on your way to an excellent application, but I like many others think there are some much needed features to make it more complete. As always us users are never satisfied ;-)
I agree with you to a certain degree on alarm titles, as I like the simple time and days titling, but I have a feeling many probably want this feature to feel more organized or something. Couldn't you leave the time and date showing and still allow them to enter a small title or description if they so chose? Or set the description to show as a mouse over tooltip or vice versa display the title and show the time/days as a mouse over tooltip.
I would like to make the following suggestions:
I would like to have a readable clock visible on the screen for viewing at night. So this suggestion is to allow a resizeable, with a full screen option, clock to display on the screen. I would love a fullscreen clock with black background and a burgundy typeface color that would be similar to the old red light alarm clocks. It's readable at night but not too bright. Perhaps the alarm could simply modify the display to then include the snooze, stop buttons etc. or have them there already and just grayed out until the alarm kicks off. Of course you could also give us the option to modify the background and typeface colors if you wish.
I would also suggest for those who want their computer to go to sleep to create a sleep timer option that would not only allow them to play some soothing music to go to sleep, but to allow them to put the MAC to sleep as well once the timer or playlist finished. They obviously would set their alarm to wake the MAC the next morning. Perhaps you could tie this into the fullscreen clock as well, so that when the sleep timer is initiated it starts up the fullscreen clock.
I also like the idea of the screen slowly brightening over a specified time as well, but I'm not dead set on it either as it would complicate the program further. If you can set up the fullscreen clock, then perhaps you could have it slowly change from black to white over a specified time or for those who have the MAC wake perhaps it could slowly brighten the screen over time. I personally use EarthDesk for this feature currently. I set my second monitor to a close up view of the US and set it so that my timezone starts on the right side of my screen so that as the sun rises on EarthDesk it starts to shine on my screen. So it slowly helps to wake me as well. Perhaps this is a better tool for that feature.
A countdown timer would be a nice feature, but one I probably would not use very often myself and I probably would simply find a widget to do that for me instead. But I wouldn't balk at having it within this application if it is easily createable.
First of all, thanks for the continued development on Alarm Clock, which has become an invaluable tool for me.
One thing I keep wondering about is its memory footprint - AC usually uses around 50MB (non-virtual) memory, which seems a bit excessive... Any details on that?
Hi Dexter,
Yes, 50 MB seems a bit excessive. Is this "real memory" or "private memory"? What is the private memory usage? Are you using the latest version of the alarm clock?
On my computer, alarm clock has been running since my last computer restart around 2 weeks ago, and it's using 12 MB. Even when an alarm goes off, it's generally only using around 16 MB total on my machine.
britsda should check out iTunes Shut from GuguSoft. It puts your computer to sleep after a set amount of time, playlists or song count. Kinda cool. I always use it with Alarm Clock.
Here is a feature request.
Could you make a way to set a default alarm? And even maybe an alarm favorites drop down?
I usually stick to a certain alarm. It's a tiny bit frustrating to go and choose the same alarm every time. Especially when I'm really tired.
One more thing:
A couple of times I accidentally set an alarm forPM instead of AM and overslept.
Could you make the sun and moon pictures bigger? Or the AM/PM more fool proof?
Thanks-
This is a really cool program-
I'd like to have them titled actually, and I don't think that problem your girlfriend has would happen.
Since I have one recurrent alarm set for 8AM everyday (like I assume most people have theirs to wake up as well), that one wouldn't need renaming. I just un-enable it whenever I want to sleep in and enable it again when I need to wake up early. It'd be nice to have it titled, since it never changes.
Same thing for the second recurrent alarm I have, for my medication, a bit later in the morning, set for every day of the week and always enabled. It'll never change or need constant renaming. I won't confuse the two or anything, but it would feel a bit more organized and neat if they both had names I think. :)
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