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Alarms view

This is the second tab of WakeUp. It allows creation and modification of all alarms.

Overall:

The Alarms view consists of two very different screens. The first, pictured above, allows review and traversal across all alarms. Through the table, you can add, edit, and delete whole alarms. When an alarm's time to sound has passed, it turns yellow, like the first line in the table above. If the alarm is not temporary, it remains in the list, and will reschedule itself after it has had its chance to fire. An alarm appearing yellow for a considerable time is either held up by another alarm (causing its state to be "pending"), or it is currently sounding and has not yet finished. To permanently delete an existing alarm, select it in the table and press the Delete button. To see the details of an existing alarm, select it in the table above and press the Edit button (or double-click it in the table, or pressing the Enter key when it is selected). The view will change to the Alarms edit screen (as described below), the same screen used to add new alarms.

The second Alarms view, (the edit screen pictured above), is only seen when it is necessary to work with the details of a particular alarm. This screen is opened when adding a new alarm or editing an existing one. The Alarms edit screen can be seen as two parts - the alarm's options in the upper section, and its sounds in the table of the lower section. Zooming in on the upper section, we can see each of the options in the picture below:

This screen is arranged into only a few fields, but is much more powerful than it appears. Virutally any regularly timed event can be programmed using just this screen. For this simplicity, various fields' meanings change slightly as a result of other fields' values. This should become intuitive with just a little use. If you're looking at the options above too closely, trying to read ahead, you probably see that my nephew Matt was born on leap day, and yes, he actually was. Note after the Type: Annual field, the screen depicts Every 4 years as its interval. This makes sure we accurately catch Matt's real birthday every 4 years. According to the calendar, he's 4 and will soon graduate highschool.

First time this alarm will fire:

Adding or editing an alarm begins on the first line, by setting the first date and time you want the alarm to fire. When adding, the values are default-filled to the current date and time, and of course, you can set each of them. When editing an existing alarm, they represent the next time the alarm is set to sound, not the first.

Alarm Types:

The alarm type is where most of WakeUp's flexibility begins. We define six different types of alarms: Schedule, Hourly, Daily, Monthly, Nth Day, and Annual Most people won't immediately see why these distinct categories, so each of these types is described in detail below.

Type Scheduled Alarms (and general overview of other fields):

There are some alarms you need to set, but don't want to repeat regularly, such as a visit from an IRS tax auditor. For a nicer example, we'll use a haircut appointment, but you get the point. Scheduled alarms are events you must schedule, but don't want permanently on your calendar.

The Scheduled alarm above will sound at 2:30 in the afternoon, playing a couple of werewolf songs, and give us the text reminder "Haircut Appointment At 4:00". Note after the Type: Scheduled field, the screen knows it will fire only 1 time. This is true of every Scheduled alarm. After it sounds, it disappears from the queue never to be seen again. Aside from dentist visits amd teachers' conferences, Scheduled alarms should be particularly useful for those of you who predict major future world events. Since we were thinking of you here, please remember us when you're absolutely sure of really big precognitive visions.

Following the Only 1 time field, there is a Repeat Sounds dropdown box. With this, you can choose to play the alarm sound(s) only once (as shown above), repeat infinitely until turned off, or select a number of times the sound(s) will play, between 1 and 100. The default is "Play Sounds Once". If you do not change this setting, the sound(s) will play only once, and the alarm will disappear when finished, whether you are there to hear it or not. This is always a matter of preference, so it's up to you (per alarm).

The Description field allows you to specify the text message that is displayed in the Alarm Clock view when the alarm sounds.

The Random play checkbox allows sounds to play back in a different order every time the alarm fires. Of course, that's not very important for a Scheduled alarm, but for an alarm you hear every day or week, it's nice to change up the order.

The Gap X seconds between sounds field lets you specify a number of seconds of silence between sounds (in increments of 1/10ths of a second). If, for example, the alarm uses a fire alarm ringing as its sound, you definitely want a couple of seconds of silence between rings. Otherwise, anyone else near will turn off the alarm for you, and may not do so in a nice way.

Type Hourly Alarms:

If you're one of those people who likes to hear a clock chime every hour, this one's for you (but not for us)...

We do, however, see very good use of Hourly alarms for other puposes, such as the pill reminder alarm above. Note that this is an Hourly alarm, but the interval (after the Type Hourly field) is set to only fire Every 4 hours, as opposed to every hour. Pills taken at regular intervals such as these can help keep us healthy, so this is a great feature. For an important reminder like this, we actually suggest looping the sound so it must be manually turned off to finish. The Every 4 hours probably makes sense of the interval setting, as compared to the earlier example of a Scheduled alarms' Only 1 time, which could not be changed.

Type Daily Alarms:

The most obvious use of a Daily alarm would be to have an alarm sound at the same time every day (like I said, obvious). This can easily be accomplished with the Daily alarm type, but wait, there's more. Thanks to the handy interval, seen as Every 7 days in the picture above, you can use Daily alarms for events that occur on a "number of days" basis, but not necessarily every day. Setting the interval to 7, as seen in the example, makes it a weekly alarm that goes off on the same day of the week, but only once each week. I treasure this ability to play different music for every weekday's wakeup alarm, but you are under no obligation to place as much value on this feature as I do. Still, you may appreciate this method of use will also allow you to set a different time to wake in the morning, depending on the day of the week. This must be better than hitting the Snooze bar more times on Saturday than on Monday.

Type Monthly Alarms:

What happened to weekly, you ask? If so, please re-read the Type Daily description above, as weekly events are easily handled there. For this reason, we skip straight ahead to Monthly alarms.

Assumedly, you correctly suspect that a Monthly alarm can be easily set to fire once a month, on the same day of each month. Perhaps you even saw it coming that we would tell you the Interval field lets you use a Monthly alarm for quarterly events. That's why we made the example above, as a semi-annual event (every 6 months), just to keep you on your toes. Perhaps not everyone feels as I do about auto insurance, but I'm the guy who has to write this document, so I get to rage against that machine (with the help of WakeUp). I pay for auto insurance every 6 months, and when it's not due, I try to keep in mind that I want to shop for new insurance when it comes up again. Before WakeUp, it never failed to come up due sooner than I realized, and I didn't get a chance to shop others' rates before our insurance would have lapsed - no more! It's not a revolution, but certainly creates a little piece of mind to know these things can be remembered by a computer, whose memory and internal clock are much better than my own.

Type Nth Day Alarms:

So far, the alarm types described have been fairly intuitive. It would have been nice to continue that trend, but this type of alarm simply has no interval-related nomenclature. Type Nth Day was the absolute best we could do, honest. It is better described through example than giving it an arbitrary name. Certain events fall on the same day of the week, but different calendar date, every time they occur. For example, Thanksgiving is always on the 4th Thursday of November. No, we don't know why Congress did that, but they did. The target day has varied greatly over time, but it has been the 4th Thursday of November since 1941, so we'll trust that a while longer. Note here that the "Nth" aspect of the Nth Day alarm refers in this case to the 4th, and the day, of course, to Thursday. So we can create an alarm in WakeUp to remind us to thaw the Thanksgiving turkey, and WakeUp will do the math every year to determine what date that acutally must occur. When creating the alarm initially, the date must be set to the coming Thanksgiving day, but that can be intuited by the software by modifying the date. Note an Nth Day alarm for Thanksgiving will actually tell us it's Set for the 4th Thu of the month, and fires Every 12 months. Hence, for our Nth Day alarm example below, we define an event that has nothing to do with Thanksgiving: a club meeting schedule (on the 4th Friday of EVERY month)...

Thanksgiving would be similar to the Nth Day alarm depicted above, but it would detail the 4th Thursday of every 12 months (starting, of course, in November). If Congress decides to change the country over to a lunar calendar, I'm sure we will sell software updates to accommodate everyone. Not to drone on about this alarm type, but there are other very good uses as well. Some payroll systems are dependent on the day of the week instead of the day of the month, so obviously their payday related events can be matched herein. Our fine city tests its emergency sirens at 10:00 am on the first Saturday of every month, and our dogs don't like it. A simple alarm can remind me not to let the dogs out of the house when that event is imminent, as their ears are much more sensitive than ours, and I don't even like the sirens. Congress did another "Thanksgiving" when they declared Labor Day to be the first Monday of September. I actually drove to work on Labor Day once, as I never anticipate that particular holiday's approach. If I don't hear it's coming up, I never think about it. Nth Day handles that quite well. Lastly (and finally), it's a nice alarm type to use as a reminder to test household smoke detectors. It's a job best scheduled for a weekend day, and only once every month or three is just long enough to forget it for all eternity without a WakeUp alarm.

Type Annual Alarms:

Thankfully, this is the 6th and last type of alarm handled by WakeUp. Many events are annual, and can easily be set into WakeUp as Annual alarms. If you've been reading up to this point, you can certainly intuit how to accomplish that without any assistance. If doing so keeps your marriage intact by allowing you to "remember" your spouse's birthday and your wedding anniversary, feel free to keep sending us checks, we'll cash as many as you send. Without hitting the details again, the fields below are an example of setting an Annual birthday alarm.

It is important to mention an Annual alarm can also have an interval set to something other than 1. Note above, a birthday reminder is set for Every 1 year. Annual alarms can also be set for every so-many years. They're not necessarily just for birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. Although they're perfect for Cinco de Mayo and the 4th of July, we probably shouldn't have much trouble anticipating these events. With an interval of 4 or 5 years (depending on your state), you can set an alarm to remind yourself your driver's license is going to expire. Whether you look forward to highschool or college reunions, or want to avoid the committee calls for them, you can set an Annual alarm at 5 year intervals to warn yourself they're approaching. You can even set an Annual alarm to go off every 10 years as a reminder to update your passport, if you like to always have it ready, for whatever reason we do not need to know...

Open Timer:

Normally, Timers are created by pressing the big Timer button at the bottom of the screen, and can be accessed through the Timers view. There are times, however, when you may wish to have a Timer automatically opened or created as it relates to a specific Alarm.  To exemplify this, imagine setting an alarm to remind you to make a follow up call on Monday, related to a task you've already been tracking with a Timer.  When that reminder alarm fires on Monday morning, it would be helpful to have the related Timer automatically open up.  That way, you can refresh your memory with your notes, and immediately continue adding to the Timer's notes as you make the call.

In the example above, I'm setting the alarm to open an existing Timer, called "Pessimists' Club Meeting Notes.tmr".  By default, the Open Timer field selects <No Timer> (as the default, no Timer is related to the alarm).  In the Open Timer field, you may also select <Create New Timer>, which will create and open a new Timer with a name matching this alarm's Description.  Any Timer opened as a result of the alarm firing will appear in front of the WakeUp window, even if it was already open.  In the event it was already open, it won't open a second copy, but will still pop to the front.  Any alarm type can use this feature.

The Sounds:

Finally, we reach the fun part of the Alarms Edit screen... adding sounds. Note here that we provide a few sounds with WakeUp, but for the most part, you will want to have your own sounds to personalize your installation. Choose any combination of .WAV, .MP3, and .MID files for any alarm you create. WakeUp plays all three types of files on any PC that can already play them. If you don't know how to find or make these files, your child likely does. For simple reference, a .WAV file is a Microsoft Windows format using Pulse Code Modulation to digitize sound waves (a sound format from laser disc, later used in compact discs, and finally Windows). An .MP3 file is derived from MPEG-Layer 3 encoding of sound in that same compressed video format. A .MID file is acually a MIDI file, and MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It doesn't acutally contain the sound itself, only a description of a musical performance (like the timing of keystrokes on a keyboard, but usually with more subtle details as well). MIDI therefore saves the most space, but to use .MID files, your PC must have a GM, or "General MIDI" equipped sound card - most do these days. The GM sound card matches a standard that maps specific instrument sounds to each program number (probably more than you need to know).

To add sounds to your new Alarm, press the Add Sound(s) button toward the bottom of the screen. This brings up a dialog for selecting the sound files:

The files depicted will differ, depending on the sound files you have, but you see the point. If you click on a sound file in the dialog, you'll see the Play button enabled, as seen below. Pressing the Play button will start audible play of the sound file. This not only serves to verify WakeUp can play that type of file, but can help find sounds that will "sound like" the purpose of the alarm. For example, the "happy birthday" song for a birthday reminder, or a certain piece by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy for your anniversary (the classical wedding march).

Although you can only play one sound file at a time, this dialog lets you select as many files as you like. You can select multiple individual files by holding down the Control key as you click on each file to add. You can also select a range of files by holding down the Shift key as you click on a second file (to select all files between the first and second files clicked). Press the Open button to add the selected files to your alarm, and they will appear in the list as shown below (I chose different files than shown above):

You can add more sounds if you like, Play each on demand, delete accidentally added sounds, and move sounds to earlier or later in the list using the up and down arrows. Note using the arrow buttons has virtually no effect on the actual playing sequence of the sounds if the alarm has Random play turned on. Finally save your new alarm, as the Save Alarm button is now enabled. If you do save it, you can always bring the alarm up in this screen again later and make changes just as easily. Saving the alarm (or pressing the Cancel button to quit) will return you to the main Alarms view (like at the top of this page, showing all alarms instead of these alarm details).

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