FalseAlarm™

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Overview

3. Settings menu

1. Introduction

FalseAlarm™ is a program written for the PalmOS operating system that implements a random alarm clock. The random alarm clock sets its alarm to go off ahead of time by a randomly determined amount of time. For instance, if the alarm is programmed to go off at 7:00am it may actually go off at 6:54am. The clock, however, will display 7:00am. Thus, you’ll see that it is time to get up even though you may have some extra time to do so. Although you know there is a random offset and that you may have extra time, you don’t know how much. Thus, you cannot compensate for the offset by sleeping in for the extra amount of time.

When you try FalseAlarm™ make sure there are no other clocks around for you to peak at . You’ll be surprised how effective the FalseAlarm is!

This program is based upon BigClock by Jens Rupp.

2. Overview

FalseAlarm has two pages, the Time page which displays the time and the Alarm page which allows you to set either of two alarms. You can change between AM/PM versus 24hr. display as well as choosing to display or not display seconds in Options|Format. Switch between the time and alarm pages using the buttons at the bottom of the screen.

Page 1: Time Page 2: Alarm

IMPORTANT

To change the time of an Alarm, tap on the upper half of a number to increase the value and on the lower half to decrease it. The alarm must be inactive (no check in the left-hand box) in order to change it. The alarm is activated by tapping on the square to the left of the desired alarm. The boxes numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 are used to select the sound for the alarm. Use the Settings|Sounds menu to design the sounds.

To change the time, use the menu Options|Set Time or the preferences application of your palm.

Use Settings|Alarms to configure the alarms (snooze, backlight, random interval…).

When the alarm goes off, an alarm splash page will be displayed.

The Autoclose setting in Settings|Alarms will determine whether the alarm splash screen stays open. By default, Autoclose is selected. This causes the alarm splash page to close automatically. This is the best way to operate the alarm when FalseAlarm is the active program. However, the alarm will still sound even if FalseAlarm is not the active program. In this case, it’s best to de-select Autoclose so that the alarm splash page stays open until dismissed by the user; when dismissed, control will be returned to the active program.

The alarm splash page also allows the user to turn off the snooze function if desired. If Autoclose is selected then the only way to prevent the snooze function from re-sounding the alarm is to go to the alarm page and manually de-activate the alarm.

3. Settings menu

3.1. Alarms

Use the 2 push buttons at the top to select the alarm you want to change. For each of the 2 alarms there are several options.

No sound	Disable the alarm sound. You can turn off all sounds in FalseAlarm using the alarm sound setting of the preferences application
Autoclose	Closes the alarm splash page after alarm sounds without user interaction. Select this option if you want snooze alarms without tapping the screen or if you want to be able to stop the snooze function in cases where the alarm goes off when FalseAlarm is not the running program.
Backlight	Flashes the backlight with the alarm sound and keeps it on
Talelight	Activates a talelight device
Snooze	If Snooze is enabled the alarm will resound after the pre-specified amount of time. To stop snoozing close the screen by tapping above the big “Alarm” or disable it in the application.
Random Interval	This specifies the length of the uniform distribution used to select the alarm offset. If, for instance, the Random Interval is set to 15 minutes, a number between 0 and 15 will be chosen as the alarm offset every time the alarm is set to go off. The alarm will sound early by the number of minutes of the offset but the displayed time will be offset by the opposite amount so that it shows the alarm set time.

3.2. Sounds

Here you can configure the four sounds selectable with the alarms (vertical 1234 buttons). Select with the buttons at the top of the sound you want to change. In addition to custom settings, three standard sounds are available: System, Zirp and Emergency. Four custom sounds, four notes are configured according to:

Freq	Frequency to use
Time	Time to play the note
Ampli	Amplitude to play the note
Pause	Time to wait after playing the note

These four notes are repeated as selected.
You can use the test button to hear the alarm.

4. Options menu

4.1. Preferences

Change global settings of FalseAlarm.

Ignore system alarm sound off	Normally FalseAlarm disables the alarm sound if in the system preferences of the palm the alarm sound is set off. With this option you can override the palm setting.
Always start on time page	With this setting, FalseAlarm always opens to the time page, as opposed to the last screen that was opened, when it is launched.
Revert to real time ___ minutes after alarm is turned off	If a non-zero random interval is set in Settings\|Alarm then the displayed time will not accurately reflect the real time when the alarm goes off. So there is a question of when to return the display to the real time after the alarm is de-activated or the last snooze is shut-off. There are two choices: (1) Revert to the real time when the actual time equals the displayed time or (2) revert to the real time after a set amount of time. In the first case, the displayed time will freeze at the time of the alarm or, if snoozing is enabled, the last snooze. When the actual time and the displayed time are equal, normal time display will resume. In the second case, the displayed time will continue to march forward until the requisite time has elapsed at which point the displayed time will simply revert to the real time.

4.2. Format

This is pretty self-explanatory.

4.3. Set time

Change the system time of your palm. Change the time with tapping on the numbers. Acknowledge the new time with tapping OK. This might take some time (depending on how many applications are installed). Tapping on CANCEL returns to the main screen without changing the time.