Notices

Good point! though I don't think it's really all that useless or bloated at the moment...

The biggest problem with alarmD isn't alarmD itself, but the lack of clear concise documentation about how to use it properly and the "hack together" attempts that others have had to come up with as a result. The "random crashing" happens anytime alarmD tries to execute an alarm that 1) wasn't entered into the cue properly, because the person who built an app that tried to use alarmD didn't know what they were doing or didn't test properly... which comes back to that horrible lack of documentation 2) the program or action that is set to be run by alarmD crashes/fails for whatever reason, and drags the whole alarmD daemon down with it. Same causes as #1.
For anyone who's experienced a lot of "Random alarmD crashes" I'd strongly recommend you backup your old /var/lib/alamd/alarm_queue.xml file, and then delete the normal cue file. Restart alarmd (/etc/init.d/alarmd restart), and then see how reliable alarmD apps are... I bet crashing problems will be gone...

Now, that all being said... a few updates for the app:
1) Added a "usealarmd" option. After running flipclock, if you open the config file there's a setting that says "usealarmd = 1". If you set this to 0 instead of 1, no more alarmD, all alarms and things are handled internally by flipclock. Ciro, that's all for you buddy ;-) Keep in mind this is not the recommended way of doing things, and should only be changed if you have a very good personal reason to... however I've tested it and it's just as reliable... you just don't get any auto launching or anything like that.
***NOTE*** make sure you go into flipclock and turn off ALL ALARMS before altering this setting... otherwise you will end up with alarms in alarmD that will be impossible to disable later on through flipclock!!

2) Updated the "next alarm" display thing to show the time and day of the next scheduled alarm.
3) Added the countdown timer back in; same thing, it counts down to the next scheduled alarm, or N/A if no alarms are turned on.
4) Added "Insomniac mode" that causes clock to stay on at the "dim" setting all the time, so that if you like to look at the clock in the middle of the night/etc you can use this mode. Keep in mind that this does have an impact on battery life!! So if you're not connected to a charger, you've been warned!. You can toggle Insomniac mode on/off by pressing the hardware "escape"/"back"/"reload" button (the one with a picture of an arrow sort of curved around and facing backwards).
5) Minor bug fixes and continuing code cleanup/etc.

I've got a lot of the development process cleaned up a bit more too, so from now on new releases will just appear in extras-devel... this one will be version 0.2.0 and should be up soon...

great post J, I thanks a lot for the time u spent on writing this (and all the time on the clock). Ill try to add an alarmd restart at the init at the clock just for my own use and see if I can take two birds with one stone (solve my alarmd idiocracy and make the clock's alarms more reliable)
I had an hell of a week, Ill hope to have a better state of mind for the weekend to finally put here the new graphics and the informative about (alarms setting and mp3 list). I guess we should freeze here the features and release something definitive and let the app rest a bit

@jolouis: do u prefer the nick or the real name on the about page (email? home address? girlfriend to thank? face picture? dna sample?)
and congratulations for the nearly 21000 thread's views, great job on keeping the people's interest high.
Buona domenica

One small problem: Even after exiting FlipClock, the tablet stays in "Insomniac mode", not turning the screen off anymore, just dimming it, which do drain the battery quickly. FlipClock should revert the tablet to non-insomniac mode when it's closed.

Also, IMO, using the entire screen (except the snooze bar) to stop the alarm is not good for people having a hard time to wake up (like me). Inadvertantly touching the screen when trying to reach for the tablet half awake is a sure way to fall back asleep. The stop alarm should be a button, or a very small zone on the screen (I suggest the +/- buttons that are not in use in FlipClock) so there is no risk to stop the alarm when you don't want to.

Seems like utf-8 and AM/PM support broken. If I set alarm to 21:00 PM it displayet as 33:00 (%
If LC_DATE is ru_RU, or somethig other with utf chars then date looks like ****. And some strange behaviour with LED.

привет Vasily and welcome (Добро пожаловать ?) to the forum:
I noticied some issue with AM/FM/alarm setting too: I hope having the entire 7 alarms list in the coming about screen will help to test all the conditions.
I never thought about i8n: if maemo programmers worked well should not be too complicate but Ill have to consider this if I would change the messages font.
LED: 'strange behaviour' in MY dictionary is the exact translation for 'feature' . All the LED choices are pretty random (I should try to switch from beer to vodka, seem make people more aware to particulars). I beginned to write this clock then Jolouis toke the control since version 0.1.7. Jolouis have an N800 (only monochromatic blue LED) so he can't check anything about. Ill give a look when Ill touch the code again for update the graphic.

dasvidania

Yea I hear you, one of the reasons I've been trying to focus on getting all the little stuff taken care of is that I know I'm not going to have anywhere near as much time to work on this in the coming weeks, so better to get more done while I can!
The SVN is all setup on garage, so as long as you're using that to make the feature changes/etc then it doesn't really make a difference as we can always "roll back" to other versions. I think what we have at the moment is pretty solid (2 comments with minor issues, compared to like 10 comments with things like "clock crashes!"). I've been using it every day for the last week and half now and not had any stability issues either, so... pretty happy.

Krystan: That was my biggest concern with this... the code is there to switch back to your previous settings when you close/exit the clock, but if for some reason the app crashes or tablet locks up/your force close app/whatever, then those settings don't get reverted, and the only way to fix it is to manually change your display settings again from the tablet display menu thing. Two options I'm thinking about: 1) make it so that you can only enable "insomniac mode" when tablet is connected to AC... and if in that mode and you unplug, it automatically turns off. (only problem here is that if you exit flip, then disconnect, settings won't be reverted) 2) Make it so that anytime you exit flip if it's still set for insomniac mode and doesn't know what your previous display settings were (for reasons mentioned above) it displays a little warning and just defaults to like 1 minute or something...
Thoughts?

Yea, this is a big concern of mine too! For a while I was even thinking about switching the snooze and alarm off things, so if you hit the digits it would come up and say "Snooze!!", or you hit the little bar at the bottom to actually shut it off. Could move it to the +/- buttons, but then personally that early in the morning I'd never be able to shut the thing off as they're pretty tiny! ;-) What about if there was another bar on the top (above the digits) to say "stop alarm", or something like that? (and it would be a little shorter so that you don't hit it if you grab the side of the screen). Only other thing I can think would be to make either a confirmation "Really stop alarm?", or make it so you have to press twice or something...
Again, thoughts??

Not sure about the fonts/date thing, but Ciro, you seem to have that one covered I'll leave it in your hands ;-) For the about screen btw just throw my actual name and (jolouis) up there, that's fine; I think we'll get more feedback here than anywhere else anyways!

Insomniac mode: What about writing in a file the original display setup when FlipClock start, plus a flag in the same file that's turned on when FlipClock start, and turned off when FlipClock has stopped. This way, when FlipClock start it will know if it exited properly or crashed the last time, and eventually reload the original setup.

Stop Alarm: I like the +/- buttons for the exact reason you don't like them. If I can't find them, it means I'm not awake enough and the alarm should keep ringing. I would even go with a complex combination of keys on the keyboad, just to be sure. What about leaving the choice for the user (and add a second, long due, setup screen for rarely used options).

Good idea, though I'm still a little concerned with the potential for problems here because if you externally change the display settings (i.e. from the little icon on the taskbar) then it will throw the whole flipclock temp file thing out the window. Right now it already automatically tracks your current settings (when you open flip), and restores those when you exit. I'll just add a little check so that if you launch the app and turn insomniac mode off, if it doesn't know what settings you had before for whatever reason it will just give you a warning and say that it's gone back to defaults because it was confused (and of course appologise); that way no matter what it will always go to a "Safe" setting; and you can always tweak it back afterwards. In any case the chances of all of this going wrong should be pretty low so this is all safety measures...

Fair enough! I can add the extra option and make it user selectable, but for the moment it'll probably be a manual configuration setting until Ciro finishes updating the graphics and coming up with the new long awaited config screen. I'll probably go with options for "bash screen in semi-conscious haze", "+" key, "Dpad center button", "+" and "-" key together. Can't get too crazy beyond that since the N800 doesn't have a full keyboard... (and I'd still like to be able to turn my alarms off ;o) )

Thanks for the feedback!!

I finally managed to have a bit of time to take a look at the application.
The jolouis code is really revolutioned: I surrender to his developing skills and let him add the new settings/buttons/gadgets/features: I can barely recognize the code
I will try to understand how the led functions are called by the various modules and see if I can do something for a bit of i18n.
I tried to reorganize a bit the alarms setting page to make a bit of space for more controls.


the main screen is here:

[linked to the real deal full resolution pics on flickr]
I already prepared the new 'slot machine numbers'.
I just have to prepare the graphics for the new little slide buttons (to make our lifes easier maybe we can use them like simple buttons for a while ) and the about graphics.
In any case Ill keep study the code to learn something new

Hey Ciro, glad to hear all is well I was a little concerned when I heard about that earth quake over your way.
Yea sorry the code has changed around quite a bit... I wish we'd been using the svn earlier so that you could have seen the progression of it, but it started with me just commenting and figuring out how your stuff worked, then trying to make it a little easier to organize and manage, and finally it just kind of migrated into this whole object-oriented crazy thing (which I think is pretty cool actually). If you want some help explaining what's going on or what's what or anything just let me know, I tried to comment the code but there's still a lot of bits that probably could use further explanation/etc... in any case I'd be extremely happy to help!! After all, this still is your baby, I'm just here tweaking things a bit behind the scenes from time to time ;o)
The LED stuff should still be fairly easy to spot, it's in the ci_alarmNew.py file near the end I believe... gets called either from ci_clock or... somewhere, I'd have to go back and look again lol
I really like the re-organized layouts, when you've got them to a "happy point" just make a new directory on the garage SVN and upload them and I'll roll them into the code and adjust things accordingly if you like; feel free to have a go at it yourself too eh, as I said this is still your awesome clock man, I'm just trying to help out to the ideas into reality ;o)
Looking forward to the updates!