Alarm

You can’t always rely on your brain to remind you of everything you need to do, even though you specifically try to remember the time and date of important events. Luckily, developers came out with many computer solution, just like Alarm, which sits quietly in the system tray, only letting you know when time is due.

A major advantage, especially for this kind of application, is that you don’t have to go through a setup process to make it work. On the one hand, this means you can deploy it on a removable storage device to take all settings with you and use on other computers as well. What’s more, system registries remain intact, and so does the target PC’s health status.

On launch, the application goes directly to the tray area, but a small balloon tooltip lets you know it’s there. Interacting with the corresponding icon brings up the main window, which is the only way you can set up one, or more alarms. These are stored in a list, filtered by name, with the possibility to edit, or remove them later on, but automatically get discarded when done.

You might want to access the settings panel first. There aren’t any specific options to manage, but it’s the only way to configure alerts a bit better, by choosing an audio file to start playing when the specific time strikes. Sadly, this applies to all alarms, with no option to pick a different sound for every item.

Alarms don’t have to be set to match the current day, with the option to make the application run with Windows helping a lot in this regard. Setting up an alarm requires you to add some text, and specify the date and time to trigger. A notification tooltip shows up from the tray area, with an option to snooze for a specific number of minutes.

Alarm is a practical application which comes in handy especially because it’s portable. Setting up alarms only takes a few seconds, with the possibility to plan them in future days as well. Sadly, you can only pick one song to play for all tasks, but the overall impression, and simplicity in design makes it worth a try.