skwire, I know a user mentioned adding an alarm clock feature to trout. Is this still planned?-superboyac
Nope, I hadn't planned on adding this. If you just want an alarm clock app that will play an MP3, I'm sure there are a myriad out there. If you can't find one you like, I'll consider writing one for you.
-skwire
I've probably spent a good 10-20 hours searching for one in the past year alone. There's nothing that's all that great. The best one i've come across is Alarm Clock Pro, which is primarily a Mac application, but the Windows version works well also. The only problem is the way it handles playlists, which is the main thing that I'm looking for, and the reason why I haven't found any that can do it. I think if you did one, it would be a fantastic idea. Just as a preview, I'll give the basics of what I think it should be able to do:
Most alarm clock software can play a chime or something, that's easy. Where they all fail is their handling of playlists, since it gets complicated once you start considering that the alarm software is not necessarily a music player. So does it launch another player? That's what most of them do, but the problem there is that you lose the snooze functionality. The alarm program can't snooze another software, but it can snooze it's own built in chimes or other wave files. That's why most of the programs out there suck, they haven't gone the extra length to handle snoozing of playlists. So they either have no playlist functionality or they do, but there's no snooze. This is key to what I am looking for.
Also, the program should have a shuffle option. i don't want to wake to the same music in the same order every day, and I don't want to change the order every day. One option is to let the program launch the music player, like i said, but then how do you snooze it?
The other missing feature in most software is the scheduler for repetitive alarms. They can all repeat every Friday, but can they repeat every other Friday? Hmmm, that's the tough one. To do that, you need to give the user the ability to set up weird repetitive cycles like that. Alarm Clock Pro can do it in a funky way. The best way i've seen it is on mylife organized, where the scheduler can be set to repeat "every X days", so if you set it to 14, it's every other Friday. That's what I'm talking about. i can post screenshots of all of these things if it will help.
So that's what it comes down to. The distinguishing features are:
playlist support
shuffle feature
snooze capability for playlists
flexible repeat alarm scheduler (must cover all possibilities)
How's that?