Notices

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.

There appears to be a problem with changing the alert sound. The sound is not actually changed if there are no alerts in the list. If you add an alert to the list first it will work. I will shortly release a new version that fixes this bug.

It would be nice if the Timers were saveable.
I normally have always the same alarms.
Never the less: Nice app!

A new version (0.2.1) that fixes the issue of not being able to change the alert sound if there were no alerts in the list is now available in extras-devel.

@Fellfrosch: thanks for your feedback. I'm planning to add the saving of alerts. Not sure when I'll get to it, though.

Thanx that would be great!

i tried this app, but it crashes as soon as I add a time. When I start the app from the terminal, the following error msg gets printed:

Any idea?

I assume you have CSSU installed? That looks like the same problem as here. I have not tried the CSSU yet, so I have not come across this myself. The fix for this has been found, but it seems it has not been released yet. We just have to wait for the next CSSU update

thx. I do have the CSSU installed. I'll wait for the fix to come then...

Version 0.3.0 with saving and loading of timers is now out.

A timer is saved as an XML-file. The opening of the save/open dialog is slooow, patience required...

The save/open dialogs prompt /home/user/KitchenAlert, which is created at install. That is not under "N900", so if you want to delete timers with built-in file manager or wish to save space on /home you may want to save elsewhere. (I was too lazy to try to figure out why creating the default directory under "N900" didn't work...)



When installing/updating, pulseaudio is restarted. If this fails for any reason (e.g. it being restarted too often), the device goes completely mute. A reboot will fix it. (Nothing to do with the updated version.) All warnings from the post #1 still apply.

Btw, the app should be usable also for CSSU users again. The latest CSSU update got rid of the problem with Qt Mobility. (Still have not tried CSSU myself).

Version 0.4.0 with "sticky timers" is now in extras-devel

Sticky timers (that are loaded every time the application starts) can now be added (see the menu).
Warning: they significantly increase the time the app takes to open. And it isn't fast to start with...

The application is unresponsive while loading the sticky alerts, even if the buttons appear during loading (which only happens if a failure message pops up). If it appears frozen for a moment after complaining about a non-found timer it is most likely just busy trying to open the next one...

Also, stopped and never started alerts now show their full time and "stopped" instead of 00:00:00.