October 22, 2011

One of my long time frustrations since adopting the iPhone was the crappy alarm clock. Sure, you can set an unlimited number of alarms, but you are stuck with either a limited number of truly abysmal sounds to wake up to, or the custom ringtones you’ve added. I don’t know about you, but my ringtones are meant to jolt me from whatever I’m doing, and I prefer to be woken gently. What I wanted was the ability I always had on my Palm devices to use my music collection to wake me the way I wanted.

Recently I came across ALmu/Holiday Alarm, which for only $1.99 does everything I want from an alarm clock, and more!

Like the built in alarm function, ALmu/Holiday Alarm also allows you unlimited alarms. You can set alarms to repeat with a fair amount of flexibility, too. For example, I have one alarm set to go off Monday through Friday at 5, and a second repeating alarm set for the 3rd Saturday of each month for drill. I don’t worry about not getting up in the morning.

More importantly, I don’t worry about being jolted from gentle slumber by a ringtone that was clearly designed to grab your attention fast. With ALmu, I can pull my wake-up sounds right from my iPod collection. This means I can rouse slowly to the gentle sound of wind that intros David Gates’ classic Suite: Clouds and Rain. By the time the music starts, I’m conscious, and ready to start moving. And the song will keep playing if I want to keep listening – it doesn’t just play the same 30 seconds in an endless annoying loop.

If you don’t want to wake to music or pre-set annoying sounds, you can record your voice as an alarm. I’m thinking of getting my parents to record “it’s wakey wakey time, rise and shine!” so I can relive my childhood each morning.

You can set each alarm to vibrate if you want. This can be helpful to wake you up, but if you want to listen through to  a piece of music, it’s more of an annoyance. But you have the choice. You can also choose whether or not you want to snooze, and for how long. I’m not a snoozer. Once I’m up, I’m up. But I know a lot of people who won’t get up until they’ve hit that snooze 2-3 times. ALmu gives you the flexibility to set the length of your snooze from 5 minutes to 30 minutes.

Of course, one of the best features of ALmu is that it takes full advantages of iOS’ multi-tasking ability. No need to worry about making it the active app before going to bed at night. You can absolutely set this when you install it, and never worry about it again. The only possible exception would be if there is an update – you will want to go back into the app to make sure it’s active.

A feature that makes ALmu absolutely unique is its holiday integration. How often has your alarm gone off on that Monday holiday? Mine has – and then it’s difficult to get back to sleep. But this is a thing of the past with ALmu. It comes with holiday calendars for several countries pre-installed. US holidays include Columbus Day, Thanksgiving Day, Independence Day, and a few more. Even nicer, you can edit the database that’s used for these holidays via File Sharing in iTunes, as it’s a simple text file. I wish I’d thought of doing the edits before my alarm did not ring on Columbus Day. (D’oh!) But I’ve now removed those holidays for which I’m not off, and added in things like Mardi Gras, and teacher work days. We don’t always follow a strict government holiday calendar, and will shift holidays around to suit the needs of the school system, so this is a totally awesome feature.

As you can see from the above screen shot, ALmu includes a music timer. This means that you can also use the music in your iPod to fall asleep at night and not worry about your music playing all night. An hour notification is also included. I haven’t had this since I stopped wearing digital watches, but it’s nice to have if you need to keep an eye on the time.

I must confess, my favorite feature of ALmu thus far is the responsiveness of the devs. I recently went from my home in the central time zone to relatives who live in eastern time. I stayed for a 3 day weekend and had to drive home on that Monday, so I didn’t bother about turning off my alarms. Much to my surprise, my alarm went off at 6 a.m. instead of 5! ALmu had compensated for the time change. Yikes! I don’t know about you, but when I set alarms or calendar events, or anything time related, I do it based on local time to start with. I don’t want it converted. (This is something that drives me crazy about Google…but that’s another rant for another day.) So as soon as I got home, I emailed the devs and told them what had happened. They emailed back, and said they would try to take care of it. Sure enough, the last update included a fix for time zones! The development community makes the platform, and nowApp is great!

Check it out for yourself in iTunes and let me know what you think. There is also a free version available, but I can’t tell from the iTunes description what the difference is.

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