Alarm Software that Will Make A Sound at the Scheduled Times

May 5, 2016 1:52 PM

I'm looking for either a Chrome App or Mac OSX software that will: 1) make a chime or some other noise at an appointed time 2) enter about 20 different "appointments" each day in an easy way

Basically it's like pomodoro timer, except the alerts will go off at the actual starting and ending TIMES (1pm (pomodoro begins), 1:20pm (break begins), 1:30 pm (pomodoro begins), 1:50pm (break begins) instead of having me start it each time it goes off or requires me to start a chain of pomodoros exactly at the right time.

Thanks!

posted by neeta to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Google keep will do this. I'm sure there are other apps that'll chime at you that are specifically designed to chime at you, but it's balls easy to set recurring reminders in google keep, and as long as the reminder is set you can archive the notes off the page so it doesn't clutter up the rest of your todo list (if you use keep regularly, which you should, because it's GREAT).
posted by phunniemee at 1:55 PM on May 5, 2016

If these 'appointments' are regularly scheduled then you can try Time Out. I use it to remind myself to take frequent breaks from working on a computer.
posted by vacapinta at 2:00 PM on May 5, 2016

Response by poster: @phunniemee
Thanks for the rec, I'm having a hard time getting this to work (it looks like I have to make reminder for every single time I want the chime to go off), but maybe if I fiddle around with it more I can figure it out.

@vacapinta
Thanks for the suggestion, but unless I'm missing something, it doesn't look like it schedules these alarms at a specific time. I'm hoping for something that can be set by the actual UTC time, and not "whenever I press start". There also seems to be a lack of a sound. Otherwise looks like a cool app!
posted by neeta at 2:14 PM on May 5, 2016

Yeah, you will have to set a reminder for each one, but as long as you're doing them at the same time every day you can just set them to be recurring and it's a once-and-done situation.

I don't know about in-browser, but if you're using it as a phone app you ought to be able to change the notification sound in your device settings if the baked-in one isn't doing it for you.
posted by phunniemee at 2:18 PM on May 5, 2016

Due might do what you want.
posted by SansPoint at 2:42 PM on May 5, 2016

I would probably just add a crontab. Maybe something like:


0,30 8-13 * * * say "Start pomodoro"
20,50 8-13 * * * say "Start break"


That would make your Mac say the words "Start pomodoro" at 8:00am, 8:30, 9:00, etc., 1:30pm. And make your Mac say the words "Start break" at 8:20am, 8:50, 9:20, etc, 1:50pm. If you want to play a sound, use something like afplay /path/to/sound/file.mp3 in place of say "start pomodoro". The six sections are minutes, hours, day, month, day-of-week, and command to run. Use comma to include multiple times, hyphen to include a range, asterisk to include everything. Throw a # hash symbol in front of the line if you want to turn it off.

Apparently launchd/launchctl is the new way to do this, but I learned terminal on Fedora 2 and they can take my crontab from my cold dead hands. And using launchctl to set this up seems way beyond something for a casual user, involving editing plist files and multiple terminal commands, while cron just needs you to put those two lines in /etc/crontab.
posted by jraenar at 9:55 PM on May 5, 2016 [1 favorite]