Notices

Yeah.

When I first installed this, I was thinking, wow! This is so awesome!

Then depression set it.....

It locked up my tablet, and when I tried to close it, my task manager thingy had it listed as "unnamed".

I even had to reboot and change the display settings under the control panel back so it wouldn't drain the battery.

Other than all of that unnecessary crud that happened, this application is definitely one to watch out for once those bugs get squished.

not silly at all if you ask me... but yes after the binding to the alarmd and other jolouis code optimizations that tablet=1 probably does not have more sense. There still should be last version I worked on that worked on normal desktops (I kept everything multiplatform since I developed directly on the pc). The 'tablet' disabled the led and the osso calls and add an alarm sound on pc is straightforward. Time to return to the base (friday) and I could take a look.

I have no idea what really would stop a 770 to run it...
I dont remember if the app test the 770 for the led coloring bs... maybe just trying to disable completely the led managing (there should be a led=1 somewhere in c_init code...

Can you implement time with seconds as an option? For those times when we need to time something by seconds and we don't have a clock available.

Would it be possible to set an option for having the alarm turn off 5 minutes for every 15 minutes (or possibly some customizable interval) it rings? I am a heavy sleeper and I normally set my alarm ahead of the time I actually want to get up to compensate. However, this normally leads to the alarm ringing for about half an hour, so when I finally get around to turning it off, my n810 is very hot to the touch. This feature would be great so that I wouldn't be afraid of overheating or some other nasty consequences.

Lastly, would it be possible to have an option for flipclock to show the "official" time from time.gov/other official time website for US users, with settings for the timezone (and possibly other countries with their respective online sources)?

Okay lots of questions to answer here!

First let me address problem-related ones:

Didge - If you reflashed your tablet then what did you do afterwards to setup the alarms again? I.e. did you just install flip, and it randomly started doing this? or did you install Flip and then set your daily alarms and it went sour after that? Have you tried opening x-term and running "flipclock --fix-alarms"?

OsoPardo - Sounds like you had insomniac mode on or something to keep the display lit; that's really the only thing in flip that will drain the battery. The alarm Icon is in the tray to let you know that flip alarms are still set; you can clear them by re-installing the app and running "flipclock --fix-alarms" from X-term. This will clear out any alarms defined by flip on the system that are no longer enabled/setup in the app itself. Once you do that you can uninstall again if you want and it should be all good.

Addison - Sorry to hear that it locked up! The new version I'm working on is much more stable and doesn't do odd things like that (I've run into that happening in current Flip on the odd occasion, it sucks I know but at this point I'm just focusing on the new better version as I couldn't find the cause of that problem). If you had insomniac mode turned on and the app crashed/locked up then yea u would have to change display settings manually to fix it; glad you got that sorted out, and sorry for the bad experience but please keep an eye out and try the app again when the new release comes along!

tjutzu - I'm with Ciro on this, I have no idea why it wouldn't work on a 770... I assume you've got OS2008HE running on it? My only guess would either be some hardware-specific code somewhere, or a problem with one of the libraries not being the same... anyways, new version is much more portable and should hopefully work there... I'll see if I can test it on my bro's old 770 at some point once it gets a little further along..


Now then, onto suggestions! Thanks for all the great feedback so far by the way everyone!!

This is my main problem with the app as well... and it stems from me not really having any clue about design, but more focusing on making things actually work. If it's any consolation I've slept in more than a few times because I hit the clock and missed the snooze bar so the alarm just shut up and never rang again! So this will be changed definitely...

Should be pretty easy to do, but I haven't gotten to re-implementing the gstreamer audio playback stuff in the new version yet, so when I get there I'll see what I can do. I'm also trying to get system volume VS app volume sorted so even if system volume is low the alarm will still be audible.

- Interesting, I can probably try to implement a "simplified alarm mode" so you just set one alarm time and it happens every day; if you don't want it, turn it off.
- I've tweaked the screen-changing code, it was pretty sensitive before... it's a little more laid back now and takes some definite effort to use. Key point here being all of the controls are now setup by the themes, so if you want a clock layout without the "drag" thing and with a button instead, just tweak (or create a new) theme that has that setup instead of the drag button... very easy, I'll explain more later.
- Sure, option to disable snooze, that's doable.
- You can already choose your own alarm sound; just press where it says "Sound" right now and a file browser will open up.
- "Automatic screen dimming based on time of date and position"; this I'm not so sure about... seems pretty complicated to get working properly for everyone, and I really don't see it being worth the work at this point...Interesting idea tho!

I had originally thought about/planned something like this but I understand the media player API is very undocumented and finiky/ I've put it on my todo list though so I'll try. It would be cool I agree...

This is taken care of already in the new version of the app.

I was thinking about this the other day too; I think right now I'll do an "Alarm max time" so that to prevent battery drain/etc you can tell the app to "give up" playing an alarm after an amount of time (say 15 mins? 30mins? some customizable option). The interval thing could be a bit more tricky, but I can see the benefits too so we'll see, I just don't know how to go about keeping it as part of the fairly "simple" alarm interface that we've got (i.e. we don't want to be overwhelmed with options for every alarm!).


Ciro I'm going to need those amazing design skills of your again at some point buddy, the new version of the app is slowly coming together but to get some of the functionality and changes I'm just kind of making up "cheap knock-off temp graphics/screens" for some things, so once I get it all sorted it would be awesome if you could do up some proper graphics to replace my crappy ones ;-)

Thanks All!

Oh, temp....

yeah, now that would be a cool feature, show the temperature

If the weather app can access the internal temperature sensor, why can't the clock. Now, that would be a cool little themable add-on.

Feature creep it is

David...

I have to admit that I haven't looked at flip clock in quite awhile, and am waiting for the new version before loading it again, so maybe I don't understand the design exactly. With that being said, how about a single tap anywhere on the screen does a snooze, and a double tap dismisses the alarm?

Jim

I installed Flipclock again.
And as far as I can remember, my alarms where still there. I think they are stored in the backup which includes the gconf stuff. :-(

I did that fix alarms before and it didn't work.
Now I did it again and changed the time of the device to reproduce it, but it didn't ring. So perhaps it's fixed. Will see on next wednesday. :-)

Didge,

Somewhere along the line, I got a ghost alarm set as well. I think it was on Tuesdays at 12:05 am. I tried the -fix-alarm, uninstalling/reinstalling, and a couple of different versions as well. Sometimes it seemed like it was fixed, then it would pop back up.

I think I finally have gotten rid of it though. In a different thread, I found a reference to
/var/lib/alarmd/alarm_queue.xml
apparently this is where the alarms are stored. I turned off all the alarms in flipclock, and looked at the alarm_queue.xml file. The last alarm object referenced flipclock. I deleted the whole object. Check later and it came back.

I finally uninstalled flipclock, manually checked to see if /home/user/.flipclock.conf was gone, and deleted the main flipclock files as well (/user/lib/python2.5/site-packages/flipclock). Deleted the reference in alam_queue.xml and rebooted. Waited a day or two, it didn't come back. Installed flipclock again. Now the only time I see a flipclock object in alarm_queue.xml is if I enable one in flipclock. Haven't seen that ghost alarm again.

I think I must have had a messed up file in there somewhere that had alarm info in it and would re-write the ghost alarm when flipclock was run. Don't know really. Hope it helps.

Lemmy's got the right idea there; that's exactly what the "--fix-alarms" option is supposed to do, go through the alarm_queue and remove any entries referencing FlipClock that don't match up with what is in your .flipclock.conf file. Anyways as Lemmy says safest way to be 100% sure is to delete the entries for flip yourself from the alarm_queue; delete your .flipclock.conf as well, and then re-install latest from scratch and you should be OK. Most of these alarm problems were due to short commings in earlier versions of the app that I've since fixed, but that just never got cleared/resolved on some people's devices. I'll make sure I add a more "determined" fix-alarms option for the new version and also make sure uninstalling/etc performs this task too...