When you look at how alarms are configured in the windows operating system, you’d probably come to the conclusion that the system used is not all that comfortable. One would expect an alarm system to be tied to the system clock for instance, for easy configuration. That is unfortunately not the case. One of the only options that Windows users have is to hijack the Windows Task Scheduler for alarm configurations. Then again, it is highly inflexible for that purpose. Specialized third party software is what is needed.
Alarm++ is a sophisticated reminder and scheduling software for the Windows operating system. The program is lightweight and does not use many system resources.
New alarms can be added with a right-click on the program’s system tray icon and the selection of New Alarm. A configuration window opens in which the new alarm can be configured in.
First thing you need to do here is to change the name of the alarm to a more descriptive one. You can then change the time and date for the first alarm, its offset, snooze time and if it should be ignored after the event has taken place.
Menus on the left lead to highly configurable options.
Repeat
Alarms can be repeated minutely, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly.
They can be configured to repeat forever, until a specific date, a set amount of times or never.
Advanced
Configure advanced alarm parameters like the days of the week, the weeks of the month or the months the alarm should be triggered in.
You could set the alarm to be triggered only on workdays, on weekends or during a specific month of the year. You can furthermore limit the alarm to times of the day, e.g. from 8 to 5 on workdays.
Media
Media can be added to each alarm. This can be the standard computer speaker beep in a set frequency or duration, or a media file (wav, mp3, wma) that can be played once or until the alarm event window is dismissed.
Speech
Use computer voices for speech reminders. Just enter the test, pick the installed voice and set the volume to configure this option.
An option to load a text document is missing.
Window
Handles the position of the alarm window on the computer. It is possible to hide the window to only get other types of alarms (e.g. sound).
The size and position of the window can be configured here, as well as animations, transparency and balloon tips.
Application
You can run applications whenever an alarm is triggered on the system. You could use it to play your favorite song on wake up, run your backup software, open your email client or web sites in the morning.
Applications can be started with or without arguments. It is even possible to load websites or documents right away. The default viewer will be used in this case.
Applications can be run automatically when the even is triggered, or when the user interacts with the alarm window.
Send emails to one or multiple recipients when the alarm triggers. You could use it to send email reminders about birthdays or important events to an email address that you can check while on the road.
Main application window, alarm window
All alarms are displayed in the main application window. Alarms are listed with their name, date time and when they are scheduled.
Templates are displayed on the left. You can click on any alarm or template in the list to edit it right away here. alarms can be sorted with a click on a column header.
The alarm window, if configured to display, looks the following way.
Snooze is a handy feature that can be used to delay the alarm for a set amount of time.
Verdict
Alarm++ is a feature complete alarm program for the Windows operating system that is leaving little to be desired. The software is simple to use yet highly configurable to give advanced users all the options they may require to configure alarms on their systems.
You can download and try Alarm++ at the developer website.
Giveaway
We have 10 Alarm++ licenses for this giveaway. Please leave a comment below for a chance to win one of those licenses. Tell us why you’d like to win the alarm program.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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