KitchenAlert is a timer application to be designed to fit especially cooking and baking purposes. It supports multiple timers. A new version (0.2.0) is now available in the extras-devel repository.

KitchenAlert obeys the volume setting of the device. It is highly recommended to test whether you can hear the alert from where you will be keeping your phone before actually using it to alert you of something. During phone calls all alerts are omitted. The alert sound can be selected by the user, but a default sound is provided, too.

Changes from the previous version:

The user interface is improved and now more finger friendly:




The alert sound is now treated as belonging to the group "alarm" by the system. Actual behavior will depend on the settings for this group. With a freshly installed PR 1.3 global image, the alarm is played even if the silent mode is on. Also, it plays at lower volume on top of music when MediaPlayer is playing. Use a louder custom sound file if needed...

The bug causing the alert sound to jam if several alerts went off very close to each other has been fixed.

Alerts can now be removed from the list.

Stopping one alert will no longer silence all alerts.

Zero second alerts now alert.

A new (less irritating) default sound and a decent desktop icon.

Known issues:

Finding the right loudness for the default sound was hopeless. There is no volume that is right for all cases. It is now adjusted not to hurt your (well, my...) ears when using the headphones that came with the N900 with high volume. As a result it will not always be loud enough even at full volume (e.g. when MediaPlayer is playing loud music at the same time or the device is in another room when there is noise).

The application sometimes auto-minimizes itself when the device is unlocked.
Sometimes the "stop" button needs to be pressed twice to silence an alert (the first one stops it, but the sound keeps playing).

Running several timers for several hours risks draining your battery.

Kitchen alert is available from the extras-devel repository for those willing to risk lost alerts and battery drainage . It edits one sound system file, which could be a risk if there would be something I missed in testing.

Future versions of the application will be announced in this thread and I''ll try to keep the web page of the application up to date. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome in the tracker on the garage project page.