Topic: Easier Alarm enable/disable

I didn't find anything under this forum. Sorry if my searches missed it.

There are times when I don't have to work during the week, so I want to turn off my alarm for that morning. It would be nice if I could press the line for the alarm (or the icon next to it) and disable it or enable it. Sure, it's only 3 more key presses to select the alarm, disable it and then click done, but it seems like most devices try to put the most used stuff easiest to access. Right now pressing the alarm in the list on the touch screen isn't doing anything, so this function would be useful to most people, I think.

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

That behavior will be in the next Control Panel release.

3 (edited by Cecilia 2008-07-23 08:05:07)

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

Taraba, this recommendation was part of our suggestion here: http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=2565

What we suggested was a "cancel next alarm" so that you could have a day off, but not have to remember that just because the holiday falls on a Thursday that you still have to work on Friday and might forget to put the alarm back on.  (Accidentally, of course wink)

Nice to hear that something similar is in the works, Duane!  Looking forward to it smile

Vice President of Duane's Chumby Buddies Inc, Pro-Clock faction                       Clocks are life; we all expire sometime.
http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=2565

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

Hello,

I don't like to break forum etiquette by posting the same thing twice, but I just noticed that my post went into the "Beta Feedback" forum and I don't want it to get missed... this forum probably makes more sense.  Anyways it's about the exact feature requested above... post is here: http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?pid=21835#p21835

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

There have been a number of control panel releases since the date of Duane's post, but if the feature is present, I don't see it.

I think part of the problem is that alarms are (or can be) used for a lot more than just waking someone up, and multiple events may be scheduled for the same time.

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

Thanks for the reply.  I can't believe that no alarm clock in the world can do this, even a $200 one!!

If anyone has ever heard of an alarm clock that can do this... please let me know!!!

Thanks

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

I guess this is really an issue of complexity.  As mentioned, the chumby alarm system is very elaborate and powerful, but comes at a price.

Many people use chumby's alarms, for instance, to simply turn on music at a certain time, or dim the screen.  One might want to have that happen normally, but want an actual "wake up" alarm (whatever that means) to be skipped.  However, the alarm subsystem isn't psychic - it can't know which ones you mean to skip and which to allow.

We'd also have to handle the case where you turn off the device - does the "skip next alarm" action survive power cycles?  What happens if you  create or enable an alarm that would happen prior to the alarm you previously wanted to skip?  Is skipping global across all alarms, or is it settable per alarm?  What if you change the time for an alarm that you told to skip - does it still skip?  How can you tell from looking at the UI if the next alarm is going to be skipped?  What if I change the time of a skipped alarm to after another alarm?

All questions that need to be addressed - and I suspect that people are going to have different answers to them, which make the implementation even more tricky.

The simplest implementation would be some checkbox that will skip the next alarm, no matter what it is.  Once that next alarm/event has happened, then the checkbox is cleared - basically the alarm's configured behavior is overridden to simply clear the flag.  Any time an alarm is modified in any way, the "next alarm" is recalculated and the skip is rescheduled to match that alarm.  This is the most understandable behavior, but I strongly suspect would be unacceptable to those folks using the full suite of the alarm subsystem's capabilities.

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

The way it is setup now, is it possible to go in and choose a specific alarm (eg. the wakeup alarm) and tell it to skip one instance or is it a matter of disabling it completely and the re-enabling?

I agree it's not reasonable to just have a magical "skip alarm button" that would know which alarm you want skipped, but why not have this feature once you are actually looking at the alarm in question (wherever you normally go to disable/enable it)?

To answer the other questions, I would say have it skip no matter what; once you've told an alarm to skip once, it will skip even if the unit was technically off (and therefore wouldn't have alarmed anyways).  Graphically, it would probably be a good idea for it to show that "next alarm is skipped" once someone has enabled the skip feature.  If changing the time for an alarm disables the skip, the user would see that as "next alarm is skipped" would disappear (or if it stays skipped, the text would still be there).

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

Here's the problem with a per-alarm skip - let's say you've set a daily alarm.  The way daily alarms are stored is as a minute offset from the beginning of a day in local time - an alarm at 6 am, for instance, is stored as "360".  When a chumby is powered up, it goes through all of the alarms that have been configured and computes the next alarm time relative to "now" - it keeps no state about what alarms may have gone off (or should have gone off) in the past, and the chumby has no idea how long it's been off - it has no way to write anything like a timestamp when it loses power.

Now, let's say it's 5 am and you tell the system to skip the next alarm, which would be at 6 am, then turn off the chumby.

Then you turn it back on, and the system wakes up and it's 5:50 am.  Does it disable the skip?  Well, not if it's 5:50 am the same day it was turned off, but you certainly want to disable the skip if it's the next day, right?  But wait - as I said, the chumby doesn't know that the skip applies to the current day, or some day in the past - it's just skipping the "next" alarm - again, the alarm is stored as a offset for *any* day, not any particular day.

This could be addressed with some cleverness - the skip flag becomes not a boolean (aka "skip/don't skip the next alarm"), but rather a timestamp of the actual alarm time to skip, then some tricky computation to recompute the value if/when the alarm is enabled/disable, or the time for the alarm is changed.  That way the chumby doesn't care how long it's been off - only whether or not the alarm skip timestamp is in the future or the past.

Anyway - just to let you know we're still talking about this internally.  Not sure what's going to happen at the point.

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

Sounds like you've solved that issue (just make the skip next alarm have a timestamp with it so it knows what time the skip was enabled). 

It brings up a question though... is it ok to leave the Chumby on 24/7?  As it's primary use for me would be as an alarm clock, I would need it to be plugged in non-stop for years...

BTW, I do appreciate you sticking with this... as I said if you can make this work, I WILL buy a Chumby!

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Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

Duane wrote:

I guess this is really an issue of complexity.  As mentioned, the chumby alarm system is very elaborate and powerful, but comes at a price.

Many people use chumby's alarms, for instance, to simply turn on music at a certain time, or dim the screen.  One might want to have that happen normally, but want an actual "wake up" alarm (whatever that means) to be skipped.  However, the alarm subsystem isn't psychic - it can't know which ones you mean to skip and which to allow...

Duane - I use custom alarms for actions as you described above -- in my case, to change channels at different times of day. Seems it would be helpful if the alarm system treated alarms with an alarm sound set to "none" differently than standard alarms. When a user sets the source to "none" you can reasonably assume the alarm is for an event, rather than for wake-up (since there's no sound). In fact iirc, selecting "none" bypasses the alarm dismissal screen, so you're already doing this to a certain extent.

So why not simply exclude silent alarms from the skip problem? Only calculate a skip on alarms with sound not "none".

Another place where silent alarms (events) should be excluded is on the night mode screen.

For example, currently, I see an alarm in night mode every night but more days than not, it's just an event for changing the channel late in the morning rather than a wake up. The only alarms I need to see in night mode are my wake up alarms that sound.

Separating out events - in the UI, you could simply rename the sound source choice "none (event)" - won't solve all the issues with skip, but it might make a solution more understandable and/or have other benefits for the user experience.

Anyway, my $.02. Curious if this has come up in your discussions.

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

Yes - we've been talking about splitting the system into two things - "alarms" and "events", where "alarms" are the more conventional interpretation, ie. making a noise to alert/wake someone, vs "events" which are more subtle, ie. night mode, change channels, play music.

The reason they're currently integrated is historical - those folks that have had chumbys for a long time can tell you that it evolved over a couple of years from only two simple daily alarms that beep (one was retained as "quick alarm"), to an arbitrary number of complex alarms that can do all sorts of weird things, mostly based on user suggestions.

The issue with tweezing these apart again is deciding where to draw the line between alarms and events.  One could argue that the line is the use of the "none" audio source, or perhaps whether or not the "stop/snooze" screen is presented.

A bigger issue is that the two systems would still be more similar than they are different, and it becomes an educational issue about which one should be used for any particular goal.  Both systems, for instance, would have to allow you to choose and configure a music source, probably in an identical manner.  Both would probably want "change channel" actions. Both would have the same need to set the recurrence and time.  Both would want to have individual names, be enabled/disabled, and I suspect someone would want to "skip" in both.

So what you come up with is that the primary (if not only) difference is the "stop/snooze" screen and related snooze settings.  The question then is - is that enough difference to create two parallel systems?

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Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

Duane wrote:

Yes - we've been talking about splitting the system into two things - "alarms" and "events", where "alarms" are the more conventional interpretation, ie. making a noise to alert/wake someone, vs "events" which are more subtle, ie. night mode, change channels, play music.

The reason they're currently integrated is historical - those folks that have had chumbys for a long time can tell you that it evolved over a couple of years from only two simple daily alarms that beep (one was retained as "quick alarm"), to an arbitrary number of complex alarms that can do all sorts of weird things, mostly based on user suggestions.

The issue with tweezing these apart again is deciding where to draw the line between alarms and events.  One could argue that the line is the use of the "none" audio source, or perhaps whether or not the "stop/snooze" screen is presented.

A bigger issue is that the two systems would still be more similar than they are different, and it becomes an educational issue about which one should be used for any particular goal.  Both systems, for instance, would have to allow you to choose and configure a music source, probably in an identical manner.  Both would probably want "change channel" actions. Both would have the same need to set the recurrence and time.  Both would want to have individual names, be enabled/disabled, and I suspect someone would want to "skip" in both.

So what you come up with is that the primary (if not only) difference is the "stop/snooze" screen and related snooze settings.  The question then is - is that enough difference to create two parallel systems?

good question. It seems like you're already mostly there when I think about how the "none" audio source is treated in the wizard. Selecting "none" skips duration and back-up alarm screens and also bypasses the "stop/snooze" screen when the alarm triggers. But the other steps in the wizard - setting time, date, action, and alarm name are the same. This makes sense -- using sound to determine whether it's an alarm or an event.

I suppose there will always be special cases, but I'm hard pressed to think of any type of silent event that would afford skipping.

So perhaps you don't really need to build two separate parallel systems. Use the "none" sound condition to flag as an event and treat accordingly, i.e. you could exclude from skips, nightmode, etc. Tweak the UI language to reflect that "none" alarms are system events and what that means.

The one place where I can imagine a benefit to separating them out is on the enable/disable list. I'd love to have separate lists for my wake-up alarms vs. my events. Right now they're all mixed up in the one list and it's a bit cumbersome, tho I can live with it.

Anyway, glad you're thinking about this stuff!

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

I also posted this in beta feedback, but it seems as though this area is more active...just want to second (or third, etc) the request to have an easy way to skip an upcoming alarm (e.g. if you wake up early). Thanks in advance for any update/progress on this!

Re: Easier Alarm enable/disable

I agree, it would be nice to have a button on the night mode screen to skip the next alarm
Examples:
#1: I have a weekday alarm set @ 4:30AM and my wife has a weekday alarm @ 6:00AM; the alarm goes off @ 4:30 and I hit snooze, then it sounds again and I hit snooze for a second time, then I get up before it sounds for the second snooze and have to sit there to wait until it sounds to turn off my alarm so it will not continue to wake my wife. If there was a “skip next event” button on the night mode screen, then when I got up before the second snooze went off, I could have use that button to skip the upcoming snooze and the alarm would not sound again until 6:00AM.

#2: my wife gets up before the 6:00AM alarm sounds and has to sit there to wait for it to sound (well I guess she could go into control panel and cancel it, but then has to remember later in the day to re-enable for the next day) so it will not go off whilst she is in the shower and wake our 2-year old twins. With the “Skip next event” option on the night screen, she could just select that button at 5:55 for example and the 6:00AM alarm would not sound for that day.

The other nice thing to have would to be able to skip an alarm for “x” amount of days/cycles via the alarm configuration screen.
For example, we are both off for a holiday (perhaps a Monday) and we don’t want either the 4:30AM or 6:00AM alarm to sound  for that day(the above skip next event would not work because it would skip the 4:30AM alarm but not the 6:00AM unless we woke up for  a tad after 4:30AM and before 6:00AM). So if in the alarm configuration screen where you can select to enable an alarm with the check box had an additional little box next to the enable box for each alarm called “skip” and once you select/tap/press it, it gives you an option (via drop down perhaps) to pick how many cycles to skip and then put the number in the box (verse a check mark) that would be great too.

Icing on the cake would be for the alarm screen (the one with the two options that you see once the alarm sounds (one to turn off the alarm and the other to snooze)) would mimic the current brightness mode of the device. So if the alarm went off in the day and the Chumby was in bright mode, then the alarm screen would be bright and if the alarm whet off at night and the Chumby was in night mode, then the alarm screen would be in night mode as to not illuminate the whole room.

Thanks, Matt