Feature Set and Rationale for Night Suite App (Part 1)

From the day I got a smartphone, it was obvious to me that the standalone alarm clock was obsolete. Nevertheless, in the ensuing 10 years, I have continued to search for the perfect alarm clock app (Android). I still haven't found one. Alarm Clock Plus was close, until it quit being maintained in 2014. I have switched to Alarm Clock Xtreme, which is good, but not great.

What has been on my mind recently, though, is that even a perfect clock app did appear, I still wouldn't be satisfied. I want a Night Suite app. The alarm clock would anchor the night suite, but there is a lot of important, complementary functionality that I want to be fully integrated with my alarm clock.

In my view, a compelling night suite would integrate an excellent Alarm Clock with the following key functions: Do Not Disturb with Whitelist, Night Clock with super-dimming, low power warning and super-reliability.

Do Not Disturb with Whitelist

This is pretty basic, and there are good apps for it, but I want it to be integrated. If my family members need to get hold of me in the middle of a night, I want Do Not Disturb to be overridden. Not if they send me a text, mind you, but if they call my phone at 2:00am, I do want it to ring.

Bonus feature: option for whitelist or non-whitelist members to receive an auto-response when they text during Do Not Disturb hours. Customizable, here is the default: "John Doe is in Do Not Disturb mode. If this is an emergency, you can try calling to bypass Do Not Disturb mode".

Night Clock

This one is stupidly simple, but shockingly hard to find. I want a very, very dim bedside clock. Similar to an LED alarm clock--bright enough to see, dim enough not to act like a light source and cast light on my sleeping eyeballs. Currently I use a combination of an app that dims but not enough, and a filter that imposes a semi-transparent black overlay to further dim the phone.

This should be matched with sunrise functionality, that decreases the dimming toward dawn. This would need to be flexible, to handle varying degrees of room shading. This could be handled by a percentage function for Dawn Adjustment.

Low Power Warning

If power goes out during the night, and my phone is in danger of running out of battery before the alarm goes off, I would want to be woken up. Or, as is more often the case, when I don't plug it in successfully.

I think the basic functionality here would be to sound an alarm if the margin of error for power dips below a certain configurable level. Default would be 1 hour.

Super-Reliability

I am not nearly technical enough to know how to achieve this, but a world-class alarm clock, of any kind, needs to be super-reliable. So anything that could be done to ensure an alarm that is less than 10 hours away does indeed go off would be critical. The thing that comes to mind for me is that I think alarm apps can either have system alarms, or their own alarms. I believe I have experienced alarm app crashes where the app didn't re-start. Maybe one way to deal with this is for the alarm app to have its own alarm, but also set a system alarm for 2 minutes after its own alarm. When its own alarm triggers, it would shut off the system alarm. Thus, if for some reason the app alarm didn't trigger, the system alarm 2 minutes later would be the backstop.

Suite Functions

Single-push widget to go into Night Mode, as well as options for scheduled times for Night Mode. Scheduling functionality would include "X hours before alarm", where default is X=8.

Alarm Notification Icon

The typical Android alarm clock app seems to put an alarm icon in the Notification bar if one is set within the next 24 hours. As a user of pre-set and recurring alarms, I don't find this very useful. Most of the time it tells me what I already know. In the rare event I forgot to set an alarm, I don't want to rely on noticing the usual icon is not present; I want a positive notification when there is no alarm set, within X hours of my standard morning. Default X=8.

Advanced Features

This is my basic, must-have-list. See Part 2 for advanced and nice-to-have features.

Alarm Calendar; Best Android Alarm Clock App

In my seemingly endless quest to find the perfect Android Alarm app, I have a new champion: Alarm Clock Calendar. I won't provide a full review, that ground is pretty well-plowed. It has almost all the expected features that make smartphone alarm so superior to dedicated alarm clocks[1]. In addition, it has one vital missing feature: the ability to set an alarm, well in advance, for one specific, arbitrary calendar date. This is what I have been looking for.

NOTE: I am a feature maximalist when it comes to alarm clocks. Not everybody will want the complexity. If you don't find yourself wishing for missing features, stick with whatever alarm clock you have--perhaps the one pre-installed on the phone.

It has a couple of other notable features. One is really more than a mere feature, it is a new category of functionality: it shows you a calendar view, that highlights all your upcoming alarms. This strikes me as a thoughtful innovation. For me it is a nice-to-have, but I can see it being even more useful to some people.

The other nice feature is not only can you set an alarm for an arbitrary date, you can also create exceptions to repeating alarms. Again, can be very useful--for instance, to not sound on the Monday holiday. Then the integration between this feature and the calendar view provides some further value-add: instead of not showing alarms for the skipped repeating dates, it shows them highlighted in red, to call your attention to the fact that the alarm will be skipped.

The free version works fine, has minimally intrusive ads. But if you try this and like it, you should definitely support the developer by purchasing the $1.99 paid version

UPDATE 07/25/14: I still like it a a lot, but I have discovered two super-nice features from Alarm Clock Plus that I really miss. One is the ability to change the length of snooze, on-the-fly. I don't use this so much for morning wake-ups--too much effort, too dangerous--but more for reminder alarms. The other is to set "skip next occurrence". While Alarm Clock Calendar has a fine-grained way to set an arbitrarily complicated schedule of skips, it lacks this quick, super-simple way to set a one-off skip, for the very common use case of "tomorrow is an exception".


[1] One notable missing feature--no "math to snooze/dismiss" option. For some people this will be a deal-breaker, but I never use it. It also doesn't have a quick nap mode, and the UI isn't quite as nice as Alarm Clock Plus.

Google Calendar Reminder As Smartphone Alarm

For a long time, I've wanted the Google Calendar to offer a third Reminder type. The two existing types are Email, and Notification. The notification pops up, but is not super-urgent and can be overlooked; and it will be muted if your phone is on silent mode. That's all fine and as it should be.

But there are times, mainly when I have an early-morning appointment, where I want my calendar event to also serve as my morning alarm (this is predicated on use of smartphone as your alarm clock, or at least having it in your bedroom). It needs to be treated as a first-class Alarm, primarily meaning that it will override silent mode, secondarily, that it provides the various features related to modern smartphone alarm clocks (snooze, gentle wake, math to dismiss, etc etc).

The primary benefit of this feature is that it would save me the trouble of double-entry: once for the calendar event, again for the alarm. Another important benefit is that most of the Alarm apps don't support setting alarms for arbitrary dates. So you still have to remember to set the alarm the night before--a critical opportunity for error. Finally, related to the above--if the event time changes, you have to remember to go change the alarm (as a night-person, I find it especially disappointing when an early morning event is canceled, and I forget to cancel the alarm).

For the first time in a while, I took some time to search Google Play store for such an app. Finally, I found something that comes close: the wonderful Calendar Event Reminder (CER) app. What this app does is convert every Notification Reminder into an Alarm. It also provides a wealth of configuration features, pretty much everything I would expect, and more. I've been using it for a week, and am so far very satisfied.

Note that while this is probably the best a third-party app can do, it is not quite the full realization of my ideal solution. Instead of adding a third reminder type of Alarm, it effectively transforms the Reminder notification type into the desired Alarm notification type. This has a few important implications.

First of all, obviously, all Notifications  are transformed from mild reminder pings, into urgent reminder alarms. If you use a lot of Notifications, this would get really annoying and is likely a deal-breaker. Fortunately, for my personal use cases, I mostly prefer email notifications anyway, so I can work around that side-effect.

Assuming then that you can live without the traditional Notification reminder functionality, you will want to update any of your recurring reminders that do use it. Otherwise, you will be getting intrusive alarms when you really don't want them.

The last compromise is that it doesn't integrate with Android Alarm Clock apps (a direct outcome of the fact that it isn't implementing the Alarm type, per se). So the alarms will be raised using CER's UI, not that of your favorite alarm clock. The UI is pretty good, so this isn't a big drawback, but it is an adjustment.

This is a $2.79 paid app. Well worth it, a more than fair price for those who crave this functionality. I am happy to pay such a small price to have this long-standing itch scratched away. Much preferable to ad-supported or, heaven forfend, in-app purchases.

Bottom line, this is a great app, one I have been awaiting over four years. 2/3 of a loaf is better than none!

Android Alarm Clock

I spent a fair amount of time looking, and checking out a few freebies, and I have not found a really good alarm clock for Android. Right now I am using Alarms. It has a nice feature in letting you set multiple, concurrent alarms and displaying them in a list. But that is an advanced feature. Advanced features should only be implemented after the basics are perfected. And in Alarms, the big thing I want is a FAST-set.

There are likely a number of things to do to create a fast-set. But to pick on one obvious item--like most apps, it uses the + and - buttons to set Hours and Minutes. If you are developing for a computer, why emulate a simple, mechanical alarm clock? Give me a large keypad, like the Dialpad, to key in the time.

One the other hand, it does one thing right. Something that almost no other Android apps or built-in features I have encountered does. It makes the very reasonable assumption, when you begin to enter a new alarm, that you will want the keyboard for the label. Nothing else seems to do this. Although now that I check on this, I see the new version of Android Market does also exhibit this behavior.

Feature Set and Rationale for Night Suite App (Part 2)

Recap

From the day I got a smartphone, it was obvious to me that the standalone alarm clock was obsolete. Nevertheless, in the ensuing 10 years, I have continued to search for the perfect alarm clock app (Android). I still haven't found one. Alarm Clock Plus was close, until it quit being maintained in 2014. I have switched to Alarm Clock Xtreme, which is good, but not great.

What has been on my mind recently, though, is that even a perfect clock app did appear, I still wouldn't be satisfied. I want a Night Suite app. The alarm clock would anchor the night suite, but there is a lot of important, complementary functionality that I want to be fully integrated with my alarm clock.

In my view, a compelling night suite would integrate an excellent Alarm Clock with the following key functions: Do Not Disturb with Whitelist, Night Clock with super-dimming, low power warning and super-reliability.

Part 1 covering the rational and must-have features is here. This Part 2 covers bonus and nice-to-have features.

Core Alarm

On-the-fly snooze (a feature from Alarm Clock Plus). So when the alarm goes off, in addition to Snooze, and Dismiss, there is a third option: Snooze Until. When you select Snooze Until, it defaults to the alarm's existing snooze duration, but you can dial it up or down.

Skip until X date. My current alarm app, Alarm Clock Xtreme, has a "skip next". This is super-useful, but an advanced feature where I can skip until X date would be great for vacations.

Do Not Disturb with Whitelist

Option to reply with a text first time the number calls. Second call within period triggers a ring. Useful for travel, or relatives who aren't good at keeping track of time zones.

Low-key visual indicator if you received a call from a non-whitelist party. Possibly useful if you wake up in the middle of the night and notice and think the call could be important.

Timer

The on-the-fly snooze can be even more useful for timers.

Alarm Clock Plus Feature Suggestions

Text of an email I sent to the makers of Alarm Clock Plus:

Hi. I use the no-ad version of Alarm Clock Plus. I've tried a number of Android alarm clock apps, this is my favorite. I do have some feature suggestions, though. Thanks for listening, thanks for a good app, and best of luck.

1.

Allow setting an alarm for an arbitrary date. If I make a critical early-morning appointment on Dec 1, for Dec 16, I want to be able to set the early morning alarm right then and there, for that date 16 days in the future.

2.

Suppress all pop-ups. I'm not completely sure if this is technically do-able, but I my SMS app has the pop-up notification option. This causes the nice, dim display to get all bright, to the point it occasionally wakes me up.

3.

Speaking of dim display--I would like to make it dimmer. Again, not sure, maybe this is beyond your control. With my Vibrant, it was super-dim when using hardware dimming. With my Galaxy S3, it is only moderately dim.

4.

In addition to "skip next" have a "skip until" option. Use case: I have a weekday alarm. Over Thanksgiving weekend, I want to skip it both Thursday and Friday. Same principle would apply on vacation.

5.

I think it would be more useful for the landing screen to be the alarms screen, not the desk clock screen. Most often this is where you want to go. (I know there is a widget for this, and that's what I use. But it took me a while to discover that--it would be better, IMO, for that to be the default behavior.)

Calendar Remind Type of "Alarm"

Google Calendar (Android and web) has two reminder types: Notification and Email. So far so good, but they need a third: Alarm. Alarms on Android typically work the way you would expect an alarm clock to--they go off, no matter what state the phone is in, including muted for the night.

I would like to be able to create an event, set a reminder type of alarm, and have that result in my Alarm app ringing for the set time. My main use case is for unusually early meetings; the current work-around is to set the alarm manually.

Android Apps

For Android to really live up to all the hype it is enjoying, and be a serious mainstream competitor to the iPhone, I think the out-of-box experience has got to be made into a slam-dunk for the average user.

In my opinion, one great way to do this would be to ensure the basics are well-covered, right out of the box. I divide these into 3 categories.

Tier 1
Great Tier 1 apps will make the new Android user productive from Day 1, and will provide a daily reminder of how useful their hand-held computer really is.

• Speed dial
• Great texting (Chomp)
• Great virtual keyboard (TouchPal)
• Email
• MP3 player
• Browser--the current one, the only one available, just doesn't seem that good. Not that fast, not that functional.

Tier 2
Great Tier 2 apps will delight the user by letting them discover new, less obvious but valuable uses for their mobille device.

• Alarm clock--see my other posts on how curiously hard it is to find such an important, simple app.
• Timer--ideally, should be part of the alarm clock.
• Calculator
• GPS--based on recent announcements, it does sound like Google is working hard to cover this one.
• Note-taker

Tier 3
Tier 3 apps will leverage the power of the device and platform to provide excellent functionality for more specialized apps:

• Podcatcher--DoggCatcher is pretty good, but still could be improved.
• E-Reader--lots of opportunity for improvement here. I want the functionality of a Kindle, but on my phone. The key is not to have to rely on a slow, mobile connection to read stuff in streaming mode--I want substantial chunks of reading material to be pre-downloaded, for very fast access.

Conclusion
Between Android, the device makers and the carriers, if they could make certain that the lowest common denominator for the Android brand were this high, Android would be in a much better position to compete with the iPhone. It seems to me like it wouldn't take all that much. Most of the apps necessary to get half-way there are available free or cheap. If some money were thrown into polishing them, and they were pre-installed, that would about do it.

After 11 years of using Android phones, I decided to try iOS. The hardware is very good, if pricey, but still questioning that decision from a software standpoint. My favorite bridge and crossword apps are unavailable. My favorite keyboard, Swiftkey, is available, but works differently in ways I hate (mainly no symbols available via long-press). Many other things.

But the gap that is driving me nuts at the moment is an Alarm Clock app. I have gone though a few on Android, but have always been able to find one that is 90% of what I want. Key features are:

• Gentle alarm (this should be table stakes, but many lack it)
• for extra credit, ability to tune the gentleness of the gentle alarm
• Ability to set an alarm for a specific date, in advance
• Skip Next shortcut option. Very convenient in 2 common use cases, related to recurring alarms:
• Holiday or PTO tomorrow, want to do a one-time skip of recurring alarm (an even better implementation is "Skip Until __").
• Wake up before alarm, want to silence it proactively.

Speed Of Access Is the Key for Smartphone Apps

Today's smartphones are amazing in many ways, but in other ways, they aren't as useable as a turn-of-the-century Palm III. I've already written about the glaring lack of a PageDown key--a real miss, since they already have the hardware space, in the form of a pretty useless, or at least grossly under-used, trackball. Or better yet, maybe the volume rocker could do double-duty in reading apps.

What the Palm excelled at was speed-of-access. Just a couple of taps, and you could jot a quick note and attach a timer to it. That was one of my favorite uses for the Palm.

In contrast, have probably spent over 1 hour just downloading and evaluating alarm and timer apps for Android, and I still haven't found one that is very good.

Take Alarms, for instance. It is a fairly nice-looking paid app, but it just misses in terms of ease of access. Problems:

1. 3 clicks to access an Alarm-creation screen. Should be 1-click from a home screen icon.
2. This is really stupid--the datetime defaults to (I believe) the day I installed the app, rather than the current date.
3. Setting Date and Time are different pop-up screens, thus requiring double the clicks.
4. This is no surprise, since it is a common flaw in almost all Android apps, but the only way to set values are tedious up/down keys--no ability to key in the numbers of select from a list.
5. Another stroke to scroll down, past infrequently-used options, so that you can access the SET button, to finalize your alarm.
   

Solution to deal with alarms in silent mode

Alarms in Android override the silent setting on your phone. 95% of the time, this is just as it should be. For instance, I use my phone as my alarm clock. I don't want notifications disturbing me at night, so I silence my phone when I go to bed. But obviously, I wouldn't want that to override the morning alarm.


Where this can become a problem is when, like me, you rely on alarms for reminders. For instance, I might set twice-daily alarms to remind me to take a dosage of an antibiotic. The problem arises when I silence my phone, as at a movie or, worse yet, a NYC Philharmonic concert, you go to silence , and don't realize I still have that reminder alarm set to go off mid-way through.

So what's the solution? I think it lies with an extension of the functionality of an un-silencer app (e.g., SilenceModeTimer). When you set your phone to silent, this app triggers a dialog that asks you how long to keep your phone silent. The app will then automatically un-silence your phone at the end of that period.

So the extension of that functionality would be:

1. Un-silencer app looks to see if there are any alarms scheduled for the silent period you have selected.
2. If there are any, it warns you.

It's as simple as that. I can think of more elaborate functionality--bringing up the alarm window, letting you choose whether to suppress the alarms, make them only vibrate, etc--but I don't think it is necessary. In fact, the warning could even be static text ("you have alarms scheduled, that will sound during the silent period").

Apps I Have Been Waiting For

Sign of smartphones maturing as app platforms, some things I have wanted since before the dawn of Android have become available.

1. Big Mute Button. Crucial for those of us who use our phones for teleconferences. This was actually pretty good by Android 2.x, but I have a new HTC Phone and "Sense" obscures the Android functionality without making a substitute of its own. So back to sereral clicks every time I need to toggle mute (which is A LOT!). But I found an app MicMuter, that gives me what I need--a big, floating, can't miss Mute toggle button. Kind of silly to pay $3.40 for this, but it gives me what I need.

2. A good Alarm Clock. Lots of them actually--though still no single one is quite perfect.

3. The first baby steps to my phone as a universal remote control.

4. A little love for conference calls...not the fully integrated experience I wrote about 4 years ago, but a nice baby step: Conference Caller, an app that turns the process of dialing the access number, entering your conference code and then PIN into a 1-click process.

Gadgets and Functions a Cell Phone Can Replace

These articles discuss the various gadgets that cell phones have replaced. I was thinking about that the other day. In fact, I was making a list of the things my next cell phone has to do.

Miscellaneous observations:

Better software is the way to accelerate this. Until the advent of the iPhone and Google Android, you get whatever is pre-installed. And that is usually very mediocre--the cell phone makers definitely have the checklist mentality for features: it just has to be adequate to get checked off as being present, there is no concept whatsoever of striving for excellence in design, a la Apple.

Key features I am looking for:
1. eReader platform. I think cell phones will kill off eReaders before they ever get going. A big-screen cell phone will be adequate for incidental reading. If you want more than that, why buy an eReader when you could have a Netbook, for the same or less money.
2. GPS. I may be hoping for too much--I'm not paying $10/month forever to have a cell phone GPS.
3. Good note-taking.
4. This is a far-off dream: universal remote control.

I think something that would increase useability would be a Launchy-style interface, to get a them quickly. Although maybe with the real-estate of a large-screen phone, you could have everything you use frequently on the desktop.

Note taking has got to get much better; I think the design goal would be that jotting a very short reminder note should not take more than 2x as long as on paper, including time to access the app. Also need good integration with voice notes. That would include develop a user-based voice to text profile that is persistent (doesn't have to be started anew with a new handset). Google would have a big advantage here, with its huge database from Goog 411.

A spin-off article I saw listed the gadgets that would not be replaced by cellphones, along with the reasoning, related to functional issues. Two of them listed were: 1) Calculator 2) Alarm Clock. Interestingly, one of my children uses her phone exclusively for each of these functions, even though she has recourse to the traditional, purpose-built alternatives.

So I think there are two main factors holding back wider usage of cell phones for some auxiliary functions, such as these. One is age, and the habits that accumulate with age. As Steve Jobs famously said, death will take care of that problem. The other is the design factor alluded to above.

I believe with thoughtful design, a modern cell phone can be made to work very well for almost any given function. For the design challenge of the snooze button on the alarm, for instance, the phone could automatically go into an "any key snooze" mode, similar to the any key answer feature. As a bonus, software applications running on a modern phone--which is very much a full-functioning hand-held cmputer--probably can offer features that don't exist on the old technology (such as switching between standard infix notation, and HP-style reverse Polish postfix notation for a calculator).

Huge Missing Feature in Google Calendar: Snooze

There appears to be no snooze whatsoever in the browser. There is a rudimentary snooze in Android, but it has all the functionality of an $8 alarm clock (hard-coded 5 minutes). This is really a big miss.

Cell Phone Feature: FInd Me

Problem
Particularly as cell phones get smaller and smaller, they can get mis-placed. The key to finding them is to realize it soon after they have been lost, so you can call it and listen for the ring. But if Murphy's Law is alive and well, you will have mis-placed your cell phone some time when it is in silent mode.

Proposed Features
Find Me
So, the proposed cell phone feature is a password-enabled Find Me mode. You call your phone, and when it answers by going to voice mail, you have the chance to "enter 9, for Find Me option", followed by your 4-digit PIN. This causes the phone to switch to its loudest ringing mode.

Wake Up and Find Me
And what if the phone is not merely silenced, but is turned off? Well, contemporary cell phones have internal functions even when powered off, so that their alarm clock function works relaiably. So I can envision a more elaborate feature that would work this way:

1. When powered off, the cell phone wakes itself up every 12 hours.
2. When it wakes up, it "polls" the voice mail system.
3. If it finds a "special" voice mail, in which the user activated the Find Me feature, it keeps itself awake but silenced, and will now respond to the Find Me feature described above.

Asessment
As I think about it, this second version adds a lot of complexity, and poses some issues for environments in which cell phones must be turned completely powered off (airplanes and medical equipment are the two I am aware of). So I guess there would have to be an override option on the phone, that you set before turning it off. And therein lies mounting complexity--the average phone user will not be aware of the Find Me feature, and even less aware of the need to override in sensitive settings. So perhaps this part of the feature can be filed under the category of "cool idea in theory, but too many complications in practice".

Regarding the basic Find Me feature, I think there are fewer usage-oriented complications. I'm not a cell phone systems engineer, but I am pretty sure that the complicating factor for this feature is creating the ability for voice mail to call back into the handset functionality. I don't think it is anything that is impossible to solve, but I don't think it is how cell phones work. Maybe an opportunity for the gPhone/Android?