Remember To Call Notifies You Of Important Phone Calls

If you ever forgot to make an important phone call or be at home or office to receive one, you may appreciate the small portable program Remember To Call. The program acts as a basic reminder on your system that notifies you when it is time to make that one call that you have to make. The application has a few downsides to it, more about that later.

When you first start the program you will notice that you can configure one alarm in the application interface.

Here you can select the date and time that you want the alarm to notify you, and whether the alarm should notify you repeatedly or only once.

The program supports two types of notifications. You can select to have it open a file for you automatically at the time of the notification, display a custom text notification, or, and that is optional, play an alarm sound.

You may want to click on the test button to see if what you have configured is working the way it is intended. Especially the ability to load documents is interesting, as you could use the program to load an important spreadsheet or another file of importance automatically that you need to access during the call.

A click on Enable/Disable enables the alarm on the system. The program informs you if the selected settings are erroneous. This happens for instance if your selected notification date is in the past. You can then minimize the program to the system tray.

As mentioned earlier, the program has a few downsides to it. The biggest without doubt is the inability to configure multiple alarms. You can run the application multiple times for that but it is not the best solution if you ask me. Another related issue is that you cannot set alarms to repeat on specific days in the future. If you are making an important phone call every second Tuesday in the month, you may want the notification program to alarm every time automatically instead of having to configure it again to match the next upcoming date.

The excellent Alarm++ does that better but it is a commercial program. A basic alternative is College Alarm Clock.

You can download Remember to Call (84) directly from our servers. The developer web page is no longer available.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2012. | Permalink |
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Alarm++ Review

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.

Mail

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.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: alarm, alarm software, ghacks Christmas giveaway, windows software