Alarm Clock

If you have to do with the computer on a daily basis, you might as well use it for more than work, and this doesn’t necessarily have to mean leisure. For instance, there’s the possibility to set up reminders so you don’t miss appointments or forget about a certain task, and this can easily be done with applications like Alarm Clock.

The main window is pretty compact, and there aren’t any accommodation problems, especially since its core function is triggering alarms, and by default setting one up doesn’t require much effort. Time and date are shown, as well as the possibility to view all created alarms, in case something came up and an event got canceled.

Creating a new alarm takes you through a wizard process, and each step requires one option to be managed. However, the step by step approach does more harm than good here, and this is because you have to go through year, month, and time in separate steps, taking more than usual for even a simple reminder.

Among the last steps of the processes involves choosing an action to be performed. There’s the possibility to pick an audio file to be played, have your web browser brought up with a specific page, or the computer shut down. Oddly enough, message is an optional thing here, and you can only set one action per alarm.

The application lets you create one time or recurrent alarms. However, you need to launch the application every time you use the computer, because it can’t be set to run with Windows, so there’s a chance you can miss some specific appointments. All alarms are saved, but once created, it can’t be turned off, nor removed from the list.

Bottom line is that you can’t always trust your brain to remember or remind you of everything that needs to be done, so it’s best to rely on applications like Alarm Clock for this task. Multiple alerts can be configured, each with its own reminder action, but the overall creation process, and poor management of existing alarms leaves more to be desired.