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Gentle Alarm – A Fantastic Way To Wake Up Gradually Every Morning [Android 1.5+]

Erez Zukerman — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:31:16 +0000

Gentle Alarm is everything I could wish for in an alarm clock. Its paid version (linked) costs around $3, and yet has over 50,000 downloads with a 4.5-star average out of 7,475 reviews. In fact, it is so good, we put it on our Best Android Apps page.

So what’s so great about this alarm clock? Let me explain and you might be convinced at least to try its free version.

Introducing Pre-Alarms

Pre-alarms are an interesting concept, and they are at the core of of Gentle Alarm. As developer Mobitobi explains, sleep is a cyclic thing. When we sleep, we switch between light sleep (REM, the phase when we dream) and deep sleep throughout the night. As morning draws near, the phases become shorter, until at the last few hours of sleep, a cycle takes about an hour. So you spend about half an hour in deep sleep, and about half an hour in REM. During REM, you would find it easier to wake up. Even soft sounds will wake you up, and you will feel more refreshed and may even remember your dreams more easily. So if your alarm happens to ring during this stage, consider yourself lucky.

But what if it doesn’t? This is where pre-alarms enter the picture. A pre-alarm is a very soft alarm that rings some time (30 minutes, by default) before the regular alarm. If you’re in REM, the pre-alarm will wake you up and you will actually feel alert. If you’re in deep sleep, you will simply sleep through the pre-alarm. Probability says that by the time the “real” alarm sounds half an hour later, you will already be in REM, and thus will find it easy to wake.

It’s a win-win, really. No need to use the device accelerometer to sense your movement in the bed, or to use any other sophisticated tricks.

The Interface

This is what the main Gentle Alarm interface looks like. You can see the current time and when the next alarm is due, and the top bar lets you easily access key parts of the app. If you press the next alarm, you get a menu that lets you quickly tweak it:

The “quick-change” option is my favorite: It lets you shift the next alarm time by up to two hours, in 15-minute increments:

So I can very quickly decide I want to wake up 30 minutes later tomorrow (if I have a late night, for example). With just a couple of taps, I can reschedule the alarm, and I don’t have to fiddle with tiny text boxes or complex interfaces. Nice.

Quick Alarms

Quick alarms let you schedule a one-time alarm, either “in” a set amount of time (in an hour, etc.) or “at” a preset time of day. This works well for power naps, and also makes the app into a simple timer. I set up a “visual only” profile that sounds the softest alarm possible (5% volume, nearly inaudible), but lights up the screen when it rings. When I need a timer, I sometimes place the device where I can see it and set up a quick alarm.

Setting Up Alarms

Of course, there’s no need to set the alarm every night manually. Most of us keep a steady routine, so it’s easy to schedule alarms for certain days of the week. The Safe Alarm is an option for users who fear they may not wake up: It’s an alarm that rings after the “regular” alarm finishes, and uses full volume of the device.

If you have a really complicated routine, you can also uncheck the Weekly Alarm and get a more granular interface for setting repetitions:

Profiles

If alarms are the “when”, profiles are the “how”. Profiles define what happens once the scheduled time arrives. Does the phone start blaring like crazy, or does it fade in gradually? Is there a Pre-alarm?

This is the profile overview screen, and the cryptic icons let you see what each profile does, at a glance. Look at the profile called “With pre-alarm”: The icons show how a pre-alarm rings 20 minutes before the main alarm at 5% volume and doesn’t fade in. The main-alarm allows a 7-minute snooze, goes up to 60% of device volume, and fades in during 1:30 minutes. It will keep ringing for 30 minutes if I don’t stop it manually.

You can set up many other options for every profile, but I’ll just show you a few:

Rising Sun means the display gradually becomes brighter with time. TTS stands for text-to-speech, and can read out a message as the alarm rings. But my favorite feature is…

Challenges

This is absolutely crazy, and is an awesome way to make sure you actually wake up. This grid of sixteen dots lights up in a random pattern, and you need to repeat it, “Simon Says” style. You can set the speed as well as the number of dots in the pattern. I have mine set to six dots and medium speed, and it’s a fantastic way to really wake up. I just can’t solve the puzzle when I’m half-asleep, and the alarm keeps ringing until I solve it.

Once that’s done, the alarm goes off, but I’m wide awake. While you’re trying to resolve the puzzle, the alarm volume decreases, to make for a less stressful experience.

If you’re mathematically inclined, you may like the other challenge type:

This pits you against several math questions which you must solve correctly to make the alarm stop. This shows the easiest level, but it can become really tricky. I’ll stick with the patterns, thank you very much.

Night Display

Last but not least, the Night Display can be used as a simple bedside clock. It has several modes, including a mode where the screen is black and the numbers only show up when you touch it. I would only suggest using it if your phone is charging throughout the night – it can be quite a battery drain. For me, the main reason to use Night Mode is that it can mute all notification sounds. It can also put the phone into Airplane Mode, if you prefer.

Final Thoughts

So, what do you think? Is it worth a spin? Or do you already have an alarm clock which you love? Let me know in the comments!

Image Credit: ShutterStock

3 Unique Android Alarm Clocks To Get You Out Of Bed Faster

Tina Sieber — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:31:41 +0000

Getting up early in the morning is one of the most dreaded moments of the day for most of us. A cozy and warm bed, competing with dark winter days and cold bathrooms, doesn’t make it any easier. One thing that makes a huge difference in starting the day, is a good alarm clock, one that does a little more than emit annoying sounds or badly tuned radio stations.

Maybe one of the Android apps introduced in this article can help you wake up a little easier tomorrow morning.

Smart Alarm Clock

This app tracks your sleep movement to find the best time to wake you up in the least disturbing and hence smartest way possible.

The time you set is when the alarm clock will go off for sure. This is helpful, for example if you forget to put the phone next to you or if it slides off the mattress and cannot track your movement.

Some advanced options are exclusive to the pro version. In the free version you can choose your favorite alarm sound, enable vibration, or have the volume increase gradually.

A similar app is Sleep Cycles Alarm Free. It actually looks a little more advanced than Smart Alarm Clock, however, I didn’t find it convenient to use on my tablet.

Gentle Alarm (trial)

Gentle Alarm allows you to set alarms that will fade in over a period of time. The only limitation of the trial is that you cannot set alarms for Wednesdays.

On all other days, however, you can set multiple alarms with different profiles, for example to change the sound, strength of vibration, length of fade-in, or display brightness.

You can even control snooze and pre-alarm settings, for example to start a sound half an hour before your alarm goes off.

Gentle Alarm lets you pick sounds from a list of presets, including ringtones or nature sounds. Moreover, you can add your favorite wake up song or sound if the mp3 is on your device or choose an entire playlist.

Relax and Sleep

Maybe your issue with getting up in the morning has its roots in not being able to fall asleep at night. Here is an app that can help you drift off into dream land.

Relax and Sleep comes packed with over 30 ambient sounds, including melodies, everyday noises, and nature sounds. You can star your favorite sounds to be listed on top. Whenever you want to relax for a moment, take a nap, or fall asleep, combine your favorite sounds and adjust their volumes to play simultaneously.

To pick a random combination, you can also enable the magic wand in the top right and shake your device. Once you have found the perfect combination, set the stopwatch timer. You can let the sounds fade out after the countdown completes or play an alarm to wake you up from your nap.

Relax and Sleep also offers an alarm. Unfortunately, it does not support the ambient sounds.

Turning your old Android phone into an alarm clock was also one of the suggestions in Matt’s article 5 Alternative Uses For An Old & Out Of Date Android Phone. Also have a look at The Best Alternative Alarm Clocks for Windows, Mac, and your Mobile.

The following Android alarm clocks were profiled in our Directory:

What helps you to get up in the morning? Do you have any tips and tricks you can share?

Image credits: wavebreakmedia ltd

Wakeup: An Alarm Clock That Tells You What’s Going On [Linux]

Justin Pot — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:01:31 +0000

Wake up to your computer telling you what’s going on. Whether you want to know the weather or how many emails you need to respond to, Linux application Wakeup can start up your powered-off computer and announce a variety of things.

We’ve profiled a few alarm programs before, but Wakeup is unique. First, it can read a variety of information to you, pulled straight from the web, in a computerized voice. Second, it can, depending on your BIOS, boot your computer in order to do so, meaning you don’t need to leave your computer on all night just to hear your alarm. Keeping your computer off at night saves energy and keeps your computer working longer.

With the ability to recite everything from your incoming emails to your task list to the latest headlines on any website, Wakeup is an efficient, if somewhat disconcerting, way to wake up each morning.

Set Up Wakeup

Start Wakeup for the first time and you’ll see the main interface. Basically, you have the chance to write a sentence:

You can write whatever you want. For example: you could just have it say “Good morning, you splendid specimen of a human being. Continue being awesome!” But that’s not very useful.

What is useful however, are the various words you see preceded by dollar signs in the screenshot above. These are essentially commands, allowing Wakeup to find a bit of information it can read to you. For example: “$gmail” tells you how many unread email messages are waiting for you, and “$temperature” lets you know the current temperature. “$todo” and “$schedule” pulls your task list and calendar from Evolution.

String together a sentence, then click the “Play” button to hear how it will sound. You might want to play with this in order to build the right sentence, but that’s half the fun!

Configure Sources

In order to use these various plugins, of course, you will need to do some configuration. Head to the preferences for that:

Enter your email address and password to configure Gmail, for example. Add whatever RSS feed you’d like to hear headlines read to you from. Explore the options and you’ll get the idea quickly.

Set A Time

Naturally, for this to function as an alarm clock, you’ll need to set what time you want to wake up. Head to the main tab of the preferences page for that:

Need to wake up at different times on different days? No problem; you can configure this at the bottom of the main screen. Add multiple alarms and you’re good to go.

Install Wakeup

Ready to install and try WakeUp? Ubuntu users can simply click here to install Wakeup. Users of other Linux distributions should check their package manager.

Can’t find anything? Find Wakeup’s official page here, complete with source code which you can compile on other systems, if you’re talented enough. Sadly this program is almost impossible to Google.

How do you like Wakeup? I’ll be hanging around in the comments below, so feel free to join me and talk about it.

3 Apps To Get You Out Of Bed & Get Your Morning Started [Mac]

Joshua Lockhart — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:31:54 +0000

Chances are if you are the typical Internet user, your nights will likely run into your mornings, give or take a few Red Bulls. But inevitably, there will be that situation in which you will actually have to go to bed early and wake up on time, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Thankfully, there are three Mac “wake up” apps you can use to break away from your REMs and into the real world.

Red Alarm Clock

This app is a nice free widget that runs on the dashboard of your Mac. I wouldn’t say it has much going for it graphics-wise (and it actually advertises its creator’s other anime-related app), but if simplistic functionality is what you are wanting, then Red Alarm Clock has got it going on.

The widget is a little harder to understand at first than its other more feature-oriented counterparts (as mentioned in MakeUseOf’s past article, Best Alternative Alarm Clocks), but perhaps the beauty of it all is its minimalist approach to waking you up.

Rather than using one song or the traditional alarm clock noise that sounds like a duck having its feathers forcefully removed, it takes a note from the old days of radio alarms by playing one of your iTunes playlists.

Lastly, Red Alarm Clock operates on a twenty-four hour system, ridding itself from AM and PM restraints. The twenty-four hour clock took a little getting used to for me, but I am aware of many instances in which I have accidentally set my alarm for PM instead of AM.

It would have been nice to see that on the app, but functionality is the name of the game, and it certainly has that. Plus, since it’s free, what do you have to lose?

Swackett

As a guy, deciding what to wear for the day is a nigh impossible task. Usually, the best option for me is to pick up whatever smells clean (even if it’s on the floor), but Swackett is one weather app that can change such habits.

Deriving its name from three words (“sweater,” “jacket,” and “coat”), Swackett offers you suggestions on what to wear based on its weather information. For the summer weather, it might suggest a tank-top or even sun block, but in the cooler months, hoodies and sweatshirts take precedence.

Besides its basic clothing advice, Swackett gives you a nice description of the current conditions and the forecast for today’s, tonight’s, and even tomorrow’s weather. All of this information comes in a nicely packaged, easy-to-read window that also features air quality alerts and other weather warnings. To be honest, this may be one of the most usable weather apps out there.

In addition to the app’s practical clothing advice, it offers Easter eggs for various holidays and special themes that will give you very unique clothing options. Granted, the only free themes available are the Standard, Modern, and 1950s editions, but there are other themes that can be purchased for a small price (such as the British Invasion edition).

As of right now, Swackett is test-driving a new web app for their amazing weather prediction service. This app is virtually the same as the original Mac desktop version, but it runs in your web browser. Furthermore, the web app works on PC browsers too. This isn’t as nice as being able to pull Swackett up as a stand-alone executable, but it’s the next best thing.

As a final note, the makers of Swackett have announced that iDevice apps are coming soon.

Mirror HD

Keep it simple with Mirror HD, a basic little app that takes the video feed from your iSight camera and turns your Mac into a pseudo-reflective surface. I personally think that this is a nice solution to my desire to shave and tweet at the same time. Unfortunately, prior to making screenshots for this article, I had already shaved and tweeted.

The app is fairly raw with no extra features or secret cool items, but I do think it’s good for quick little appearance checks before you head out the door. This also might be nice right before an actual job interview or perhaps prior to coffee with that one girl you met on OKCupid.

The only qualm with Mirror HD might be the fact that it advertises itself as a “full-screen” app. In all truth, it just opens up a fairly large window with no options to resize.

What you might be thinking right now is, “I can do the same exact thing with Photo Booth” and guess what? You can. But at least Mirror HD provides a bigger screen. Also, you won’t have to worry about accidentally taking an embarrassing picture of yourself whilst performing nostril inspections.

There really isn’t much to say about Mirror HD except that it does exactly what it says it does. You don’t have to worry about any ads clogging up your screen real estate or any “special” paid options either.

Conclusion

Granted, they won’t be the apps you can’t live without, but they can definitely help. Hopefully they will provide you that extra morning convenience you need before meeting the boys at IHOP for a round of pancakes.

What apps do you use to get ready in the morning? What are your opinions on these three?

Image Credit: beanworks

10 Alert & Notifier Websites To Keep Track Of Stuff You Might Otherwise Miss

Saikat Basu — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 19:31:48 +0000

The web has become increasingly “real time”. But the sheer number of websites we usually have bookmarked defeats our best intentions to stay up-to-date. This is where the medley of alert and notifier services can lend a hand by being watchful of updates and sending out “˜just in time’ alerts to our mailbox or cellphone.

To be the first guy off the blocks really helps when it comes to things like early bird discounts or giveaways. Then think about jobs and the online alert system assumes critical importance. As online alert notification tools prove, the flood of information on the web also makes for a rush to receive it first. After all, nobody likes to be at the tail end of a queue.

So check out these diverse alert and notification web services and keep yourself a step ahead of the masses.

Notify.Me

Notify.me is a notification service that monitors your favorite website, blog, or social network and sends you alerts in your inbox, messenger, mobile phone, or an application. It’s a sort of umbrella service which lets you cover a smorgasbord of websites from Craiglist to Twitter.

So if you want an early warning system for bad weather or an early bird alert for discounts, this web app could be worth a try. For SMS services, check if the site has your cellular provider covered in the long list. The site was a bit buggy when I tried it out but it could be a temporary glitch.

Twilert

If you are a heavy user of Google Alerts, you might like a similar app which does the job with Twitter. Twilert sends you regular email updates of tweets that have your specified keyword. It could be your name, your website, your brand, or anything else.

You can set the schedule of when you would like to receive a “˜Twilert’ and you can easily manage your alerts by switching them on or off. Advanced search options help to focus your alerts (see Directory mention).

Yotify

Yotify lets you create your own “˜scouts’ and send them out to track things like job postings, deals and discounts, news, videos, and anything else that can be tracked with a tag across a slew of popular websites. You can even track auctions on eBay, resumes on LinkedIn, track using keywords, and even track mentions of your name, brand, or service. Each Yotify scout can be further fine-tuned to narrow down results (see Directory mention).

Savvy Circle

This notifier app helps you burn through your shopping wishlist without burning your pocket. Savvy Circle supports 200+ stores and as soon as any item on your wishlist goes on sale, you get an email alert. Using a bookmarklet for IE and Firefox, you can easily add items to your Savvy Circle wishlist while browsing the web (see Directory mention).

Also check out ZingSale for monitoring price drops of your favorite items.

Video-Alerts

This one is for video watchers who regularly like to keep themselves updated about the latest on YouTube. The YouTube alert tool sends an email when any new YouTube video specified by a keyword or username gets uploaded. The basic account is ad-sponsored and allows tracking of up to 10 keywords, and updates once per day.

Was It Up?

Wasitup.com is an example of a simple website downtime monitoring service which lets you know if your favorite site is down or up. You can monitor ten websites and the app polls the sites every 5 minutes. The optional keyword field can help you filter out the websites as per the presence or absence of the keyword on the landing page (see Directory mention).

Blyper

Usually a music lover’s taste is varied. We tend to follow a lot of artists across genres and it’s a difficult job keeping track of their latest releases. Blyper does the job for you by sending you an email notification as soon as your favorite artist releases a track. Blyper is a great way to keep tabs on music releases and also discover new music in the process. With your Last.fm username, you can add artists and be notified when they release a track or an album (see Directory mention).

Free App Alert

Nothing can send you rushing to the iPhone App store faster than the news that a paid app is available now for free. Free App Alert helps you to jump the queue by sending alerts via email, Twitter, or RSS. The alerts come with a small description, a thumbnail, and also the time limit of the free offers if any (see Directory mention).

Another similar site is App Giveaway for iPhone and iPod Touch apps.

Seriesly

If you don’t want to miss out on torrent downloads of your favorite TV shows then set up a reminder for your favorite episodes and get notified through email, RSS, calendar entry, or as a simple webpage. Once a good quality torrent is available, Seriesly alerts you and you can set options for quality and the kind of download link you want (see Directory mention).

Conference Alerts

We have been having fun so far, but the researchers among us would prefer an alert system that tells them about the happenings in the academic world. This app follows conferences around the world across a variety of academic fields from anthropology to law. A free subscription keeps you updated on the latest conference happening near you. You can define the alerts you want by giving keywords, country specific information, and details like conferences with calls for papers etc.

Do you like to be on the alert? Then these alert apps are just the tip of the information iceberg. Check out all the alert and notification web services that we have covered and you might find a few more worth shouting about. Do shout out about your favorite ones.

Image credit: Shutterstock

6 Best Free iPhone and iPad Alarm Clock Apps

Nancy Messieh — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 19:30:00 +0000

The iPhone’s native clock app certainly leaves something to be desired, and the iPad didn’t even ship with one. Now that apps can run in the background with iOS 4 – already available for iPhones, and coming soon to the iPad – there are quite a few free alarm clock apps that will come in handy. The iPad’s large screen also makes for an ideal nightstand clock, and there are a few apps that take full advantage of that.

For the time being, until iOS 4 is made available to iPad users, be sure to launch the app before you go to sleep if you want to use your iPad as an alarm clock.

Nightstand Central

The free version of the iPhone and iPad app, Nightstand Central displays the time, date and weather of the location of your choice. The alarm can be set to the sound of church bells, a traditional alarm clock and a dial up modem, amongst a few other sounds.

Nightstand Central has a snooze feature, and also gives you a variety of wallpapers to choose from, although one of the darker wallpapers will make more sense if you’ll be keeping the iPad or iPhone by your bed.

Alarm Clock HD Free

If graphics are of no interest to you, the aptly named iPad-only app Alarm Clock will do the trick. There are no bells and whistles with a large digital clock filling the screen. You can also choose to display your location’s weather and the day of the week.

Alarm Clock’s additional features include a snooze option and a small selection of free sounds including a cuckoo, old clock and school bell, amongst others.

Waku Free

Waku Free is a quirky alarm clock app for the iPad and iPhone that sets itself apart from the rest of the apps with its unique graphics. Waku is also a cut above the rest of the free apps because it allows you to use the music on your iPad as the sounds you’ll wake up to. That said, their own hilarious sound effects might help get your day started on the right note.

And don’t be put off by the bright screen – it actually has a switch that allows you to dim the lights and get some shuteye.

goodNite

If the one and only green colour in the free version of Alarm Clock doesn’t appeal to you, give goodNite a try. The free iPhone and iPad app allows you to change the background, font and font colour. You can also choose to use a photo of your own choice as a background.

Alarm sounds include a dog barking, morning birds and a rooster, amongst a few others. The app, like Waku Free, sets itself apart by allowing you to use a any one of your iPod’s playlists.

Night Stand Lite

Night Stand Lite, not to be confused with Nightstand Central, is another minimalist iPad and iPhone alarm clock with two choices in the app’s appearance. You can select the digital clock, with the colours of your choice, or set it to display 6 clocks set to 6 different timezones.

While it has no snooze option, you can choose which days you want the alarm to be repeated, and can wake up to a small selection of sounds from birds to glass breaking. Although waking up to the sound of glass breaking doesn’t really sound all that pleasant.

Ambient Alarm

Ambient Alarm, an iPad only app, takes a slightly different approach, and includes some unique features, although some of them seem to take things a little far.

The background constantly changes colour, so if you’re a light sleeper this isn’t the app for you. Others may find it soothing and it will help them sleep. The feature that seems unnecessary is that you can shake your iPad to stop the alarm. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want to do when I first wake up is attempt to do anything that involves shaking a $500 gadget. That said, Ambient Alarm does also allow you to wake up to songs from your iPod music selection.

What’s your favourite iPhone or iPad alarm clock app? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Pester – A Quick and Easy Alarm Clock for Mac Users

Bakari Chavanu — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:30:10 +0000

While Apple”˜s iCal is a very useful alarm and to-do application, it can be somewhat tedious to launch it and set new alarms, especially for minor tasks and reminders. Setting iCal reminders works best when setting up alarms from within Apple’s Mail application, but not from within other applications. This is where a little third-party Mac alarm clock app, developed by Nicholas Riley, called Pester might be very useful to Mac users.

Pester is great for setting alarms on the fly. You set the time and the type of alert you want, and you’re done.

Pester is a free application, and it’s an easy to use; however, there a few little quirks and hidden and missing features that I discovered in using it.

Set Up

First off, as with any application, you want to open Pester”˜s Preferences and set a keyboard shortcut so that it can be launched from within any application.

Note: my keyboard shortcut would not show up in the screen shot.

If you work at your computer throughout the day, you might check the “Wait for idle to display alerts,” box so that the alarm notice doesn’t pop up when you’re typing or performing some other task. This happens a lot with iCal alarms. I can be typing away and all of a sudden an alarm pops up to distract me from what I”˜m doing.

Setting Alarms

Setting your first alarm is easy, but setting additional alarms is not as obvious as it could be. When you set your first alarm, be sure to click the Set button to lock the alarm into place.

After you set your first alarm, you select File > Set Alarm (Command+N). You might expect a new clean interface to pop up, but it doesn’t. What you have to do is set an alarm over the existing one, which is already logged into the application. To set a new one, you delete the existing alarm message and change the other settings. Again, choose the Set button to log in the alarm.

Viewing and Editing Alarms

Choose Alarms > All Alarms (Command + L) to view all your set alarms. In this interface, you can remove alarms; however, you can’t click on one and edit it.

If you want to edit an alarm, click the Alarm > New Alarm and then select an existing alarm from the drop-down selection in the Message field.

Next, click the View button and change it to Edit. After making changes to the settings, click the Set button again to lock in the changes.

Notice that Pester will show data for exactly when the alarm will execute.

Setting Times and Alert Types

Setting alert time and days is pretty similar to what you get in any calendar program; however, Pester of course is not as robust in features when compared to iCal. Pester is more useful for setting quick daily alarms, or alarms that you don’t want in your iCal program.

You can set times in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, days, and weeks. There are also different types of alerts to choose from, including sound and bouncing dock icons. You can’t set the same alarm for different days of the week or month. If you want the same alarm for say Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday of a week, you need set up a new alarm for each day. In iCal, you can just copy and paste alarms to the various days you want.

Alert Notifications

When alarm notifications are displayed (if you choose that option) you can conveniently set a snooze time or dismiss the alarm all together.

If you choose to have Pester alarms to play a sound, you have the option in the application’s Preferences of setting which sound output you want to use. Pester also supports Growl notifications.

All and all, for a free application, Pester is pretty nifty. For more examples of alternative alarms, check out this MakeUseOf article. For a web-based option, check out this short review.

Let us know what mac alarm program you use and why.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com

6 Online Time Clock Websites

Jim Henderson — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:31:27 +0000

Okay, I admit it. I’m a time freak. I hate to be late, and I usually carry backup means to tell the time. Sometimes though, it’s not the devices in my pockets, but the websites.

We’ve discussed all sorts of things about time before. Simon posted a great list of alarm clock applications for various platforms, Karl let us know all about an online alarm clock, and Ryan helped out your efficiency with Qlock.

Clock sites can be both fun and useful. Here are some of the most interesting online time clock websites.

The World Clock

It’s hard to beat The World Clock if you have any interest in the time in different zones.

A summary page lets you browse alphabetically through names of cities all over the planet, or you can resort the list by country or time zone. Clicking on a city name opens a detail page which goes way beyond just showing the time.

In addition to all of the standard functionality, it’s also possible to build a personalised online time clock for yourself, add a selection of locations that you’re interested in, and all of this can be anonymous, which is something of a relief in a registration-mad web. If you want to share your custom clock, there’s a Java option better suited.

ClockLink

You get a selection of clock options including a clickable world map on which you can display the time, and it looks a whole lot nicer than The World Clock.

The focus at ClockLink is on a selection of Javascript clocks that can easily be embedded in your own webpages. Analogue, digital and just plain weird online time clocks are available. Most of them can also be configured to some extent, so you can easily match your website colour scheme.

To embed an online time clock, simply click the View HTML Tag button below the clock, accept the conditions, then copy and paste the Javascript code to your website.

Humanclock

This is a web classic. It’s been around for a long time (2001). When this website was first created, some of the ideas were really radical. Things have moved on, and there’s nothing technologically startling about what happens here now, but it’s still very cool.

The idea is that the website creator, Craig Giffen, decided for some wacky reason, that he needed to collect photos of cardboard fake digital clocks in various settings and places.

It’s all just snowballed from there. Since then, people have sent in images, and all sorts of other things have happened. Just take a scroll through the site to get a feel for it. Your inevitable questions can mostly be answered in the FAQ.

Industrious Clock III

Along similar lines, but both simpler and much more active, this is a digital clock animated down to the seconds by someone writing the digits on paper.

You really need to take a look at the site to get a feel for how much fun this is. I’m told if you don’t appreciate it you need more coffee..

Online Time Clock

Need something simpler? This could be just the thing, and it was the weapon of choice to increase stress levels for an exam I sat last year.

Time.is

One more. This was just featured in the MUO directory. Simple display, really BIG font! The great thing about Time.is is that it checks out your PC to see how the internal clock is doing. There are lots of ways to do this, but this is the one to point your non-geek friends at.

You can configure things to display more or less information at various sizes, and it also works well on mobile devices.

So, have you seen these before? What online time tools do you use? How late are you? Questions and comments below. I better go. I don’t want to be late.

Alarm Clock – An Excellent Alarm Reminder & Scheduler Application [Linux]

Varun Kashyap — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:31:55 +0000

We have shown you plenty of alarm clocks in the past but before you write this one off because you just happen to love the one you are using, let me tell you that this ‘Alarm Clock’ is different.

First off, this alarm scheduler is a Linux application, specifically for Gnome users. It is called ‘Alarm Clock’ but it is capable of so much more. In fact the name doesn’t entirely do justice to the application. With a little effort you can get it to do some pretty neat things.

Debian/Ubuntu based users can install using “sudo apt-get install alarm-clock“. It can also be downloaded if you are using some other distro. Of course it does alarms. Create an alarm, set the time and you are done. You can also choose between a countdown timer or a new alarm. If you go the countdown timer route you will be able to specify the hours, minutes and seconds after which the alarm will go off. The “Create new alarm from scratch” offers much more features and options that can be used for a number of purposes as you shall see.

The alarm scheduler options can be used to set up when the alarm repeats. Alarm clock offers excellent, scheduling options second only to cron. You can set an alarm to repeat on the said days of the said months. You can, for example, run an alarm every Monday of January and February (as shown in the above screen capture). There is also an exclusion list if you want the alarm to repeat on all Mondays of January and February but not on the 25th of January. In short: the alarm scheduler capabilities have all your needs more than covered. Rarely would you need a finer control on scheduling, in which case you are probably better off using cron itself.

You can run custom actions at alarm time. In fact I seldom use it as an alarm clock, mobile phones are enough to wake you up from sleep. I had come across Alarm Clock when I was looking for an application that could remind me of a task and display a notification as a reminder. There were many that would let you create a todo list but not many that would alert you when an item is due. So I have been using Alarm Clock as a reminder.

This can be easily achieved by using the options available under the Notification tab. There are five options you can choose from, here is what each of them does:

Play a sound – You can play any sound file as the alarm tone. Hit browse and point it to any sound file that you want to be played when its time for the alarm to go off.
Display a passive window – A window of this kind is great to display a notification that will pop up as a window to remind you of the task that was to be done at this hour. Of course you can customize the text that will be displayed to reflect what you want to be reminded about.

Display a dialog window – A more advanced version of the previous option. In addition to the title and message you can also customize the look of the window that will be displayed. You can choose to put a snooze option, and if you are so inclined you can also create an entirely new UI using Glade that will be displayed when the alarm goes off.
Run a command - You can run any command at the desired time. With the entire list of Linux commands at your disposal this is a very powerful function Alarm Clock offers.
Run an action – This option lets you run a pre-defined action such as shutdown or reboot, lock the screen or turn off the monitor.

As you must have figured out by now, you can easily use the passive window or the dialog window option to create a reminder that you will be notified of at the said time. You can also set it to repeat using the fine control you get while creating the schedule for an alarm.

In addition the alarms or reminders can be arranged into separate lists for easy management. You can also create birthday and anniversary reminders, excellent to keep track of meetings as well. You can create templates that can have pre-configured alarm settings – you just create a new alarm from a template, set the time and you are done.

Last but not least, you can also view a list of all the alarms that you have missed and didn’t act on.

On the whole, Alarm Clock is an excellent application that can be used for so much more than just alarms. If only it could sync with one of the online calendar or scheduling web apps, it would be truly awesome. That being said, if you can find a use for it in your day to day work, it can prove to be much easier than using a combination of cron and zenity to remind you of tasks that need your attention.

Do you use any other Linux application for such purposes? Let us hear about them.

Qlock – An Awesome World Clock & Fancy Alarm For Your PC

Ryan Dube — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:01:18 +0000

In this article, I’d like to introduce you to an awesome world clock that I discovered in the process of trying to solve a personal dilemma. One of the lessons that I learned immediately upon starting my online writing career is that the Internet is very much a global phenomenon.

This means that if you’re going to spend a lot of time working and playing with others online, you better quickly get used to the idea that the concept of time has has much less power on the Internet. In a business office or a manufacturing facility, when there’s an important meeting at 3 p.m., everyone sets their watch and shows up right on time.

Things aren’t so straightforward on the Internet. If you set a meeting for 3 p.m., who’s 3 p.m. are you talking about – the folks in China, Germany, Japan or the United States? When you’re an online author working for several clients, things get even more confusing with deadlines that occur all around the globe and in multiple time zones.

In order to solve that problem, I decided to download and install Qlock, an awesome world clock that provides me with a glimpse of the time zones where my clients are based, and reminds me whenever certain important deadlines are due. Using the Qlock world clock, you’ll never miss another online deadline or meeting again.

Qlock – An Awesome World Clock That You Can’t Live Without

I started using Qlock as an experiment. Before I started working for MakeUseOf, my only major client was a California based company. While it was a little annoying to constantly calculate the time zone difference so I wouldn’t miss any IM meetings, it wasn’t exactly rocket science. All I had to do was add a few hours to determine East Coast time versus West Coast time and I was good to go.

However, when I started writing for MakeUseOf, that all changed. With the chief editor based in Germany and with editors and writers scattered all across the globe from Belgium to India to the U.S. – the entire concept of teamwork is now based upon how well you understand and manage global time zones. At the beginning, when our chief editor would set a deadline of 10 p.m. the day before publication, I would consistently run right up into the deadline and once I even missed it. For a guy that prides himself in never missing a deadline, this was quite humbling.

So I hunted around for an app that could help. Just recently, Simon covered some cool alarm clocks, however those are based on your own time zone. Tina also covered some awesome alarm clocks, but again – one time zone. So, for those of you who lead the same multiple-timezone life that I do, I present – Qlock.

Once you download and install Qlock, you’ll instantly have desktop icons that display the current time in major cities all around the world. The default is 4 cities and the time is displayed in military time.

Changing one of the icons to another city is as easy as clicking on the city name inside the icon. If you want to add an entirely new icon, you just right-click the icon of the Earth in the taskbar and select “Create Qlock.” In this case I’m changing my New York icon over to Boston, MA because that’s the largest major city that’s closest to me. This will represent my home time zone. If you don’t want to search for your city, you can just click on the map and it’ll automatically select the city for you.

When you right click on the globe icon, in addition to “Create Qlock,” there’s also the option to sync your current time with any of the several government servers.

You can set up the clock to sync with the server using any interval you like, or you can leave it in manual. Once you sync your time with the server, you can rest assured that you have the most accurate time possible – now you have no excuse for being late for the Skype meeting!

Customizing The Qlock Display

My favorite feature of this awesome Qlock world clock is the fact that you can easily place each individual time zone clock however you like on your desktop. They don’t intrude into your workspace, but they’re instantly available if you click on the globe icon in the taskbar.

In my case I’ve added a California zone for my CA client. An England time zone for my buddy in the UK. My home time zone of Boston, and the German time zone for MakeUseOf. I like having all of my zones displayed together near my Vista Sidebar, so here I’ve stacked them up and there they’ll stay.

While this is cool enough – Qlock also offers a very handy alarm clock system which you can set for each individual time zone on your desktop. To set the alarm you just double-click where it says “No Alarm.” Once you do, the alarm clock screen for that time zone appears.

As you can see here, you can set up an individual alarm, or you can have it alarm on a certain day of the week. It’ll issue an alert sound, but you can also type in pop-up text as well. For each time zone you can set up to five independent alarms.

As you can see under the German time zone, your alarm date will countdown, so you can see how much time you have left to complete that article, or until the meeting. If you don’t like the current time display, you can change it by simply clicking on the time. I didn’t really want military time, so I changed them all to standard time with the “am/pm” display.

I find that in this world of international friendships and global online partnerships, the ticket to success is understanding where and when your colleagues and friends are so that you can catch them when they’re not only awake, but also the most productive. By downloading Qlock, you’ll be able to overcome the time-zone confusion and take control of your global online activities and work.

Do you do a lot of online work or play that crosses many time zones? Do you know of other tools that can help overcome time zone confusion? Share your insights in the comments section below.