Review of Time v1.2

Application Overview

Time is a desktop clock application for the Palm OS and having tried the program since version 1.0, it is quite a useful and mature product. It has a digital clock display, Monthly Calendar, World Clock, Current Day and Time and Repeating (or non-repeating) Scheduled alarms. You can define up to six foreign locations in your world clock, and up to three repeating alarms and even attach a short comment (or title) to each alarm.

Product Discussion

Having tried many different clock/calendars for my Palm, Time seems like a good bet because it combines several functions into one program. Firstly, you eliminate the need for a world clock. I doubt anyone really needs to know the time in more than 6 different cities around the world at any one point in time. Plus, it has the innovative idea of switching the world clock display, showing one of the six cities every 5 (or 10 or 17 or..) seconds. This saves screen space, and still lets you see the info that you need. Or if you choose not to, you can always turn of the "Auto-Switch" and click on the world clock display to cycle through the cities manually. Time comes preset with Moscow, London, US Eastern, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney, but you can define any other city that you need. All you need to know to configure your world clock is your GMT time zone. For example, Singapore is in the +8:00 time zone, for 8 hours ahead of GMT without Daylight Savings Time (DST).

The next neat thing about Time is that it shows you a calendar of the current month as well. Ever wished you could get rid of the monthly desk calendar from that pesky insurance agent? Or do you feel fed up with flipping or changing the month on your monthly calendar? Well, worry no more, Time’s monthly calendar display shows what you need to know in a concise and precise manner.

The third "service" Time provides, is the alarms. Want to remind yourself to turn off the oven? Well, just key in 9:40am, write "Turn off Oven" and click on "OK". Want to remind yourself to pick up the laundry at 5:00pm every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday? Again, just key in 5:00pm, write "Pick up Laundry", click on "M", "W", "S" and choose "OK". Easy as pie. The top status bar even shows you when your next alarm is scheduled to go off.

And of course, Time displays the time in a 12hour or 24hour digital display that takes up almost half the screen. The top status bar can be configured to display the date in any number of ways, as well as the day in long or short format and the next scheduled alarm. The preferences screen allow you to choose your alarm sound (from the System MIDI), how many times you wish to repeat it and how long before the next repeat. You can also choose to have Time set to "Auto Off" or "Always On" your Palm and you can configure the Up/Down keys to change either the month being displayed or the world clock city or between 12 and 24 hour display modes.

The thing that strikes me about Time is how they managed to squeeze all that info into a single, small Palm sized screen. One look, and it has replaced my desk clock, calendar and even added a reminder service. And you don’t even need to change screens to access any of these three functions. If you’re like me, you keep your Palm V in the cradle and on all the time, Time is a good addition to your desktop.

But I do have a number of gripes as well. Firstly, this being a pre-release version, there seems to be a bug in that when the alarm goes off (especially long alarm sounds), the clock display does not move. I like the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" as my alarm, and when it does ring, the seconds display stops moving until the alarm sound finishes. Tapping the display will stop the alarm and the "correct" time will be updated on the display.

The other thing about alarms is that when an alarm rings, it does not display a pop-up message telling you that the alarm is ringing and what the alarm is. If your palm is off, or if you’re in some other app, the Time application will come on and you’ll hear your alarm sounds go off, but that’s it. It would have been better to also add a small pop-up window that displays the alarm time and the comment you wrote when you set up the alarm when the alarm goes off like how the datebook does it. And after you have stopped a ringing alarm, the auto-repeat will kick in and you will hear your alarm a second time if you do not manually turn off (delete) the alarm you had scheduled.

And again about alarms, after you have scheduled an alarm, the display on the status bar will always change to display the next scheduled alarm. I like my status bar to show the day and date in long mode, but it’s annoying that every time I set an alarm, I have to reset the status bar to display the day again. But I tested this on a Palm III (okay, the Palm III Emulator anyway), and this problem did not seem to happen. There seems to be some screen real-estate just below the world clock and above the alarm scheduling section and that would have been a better place to "Always" display the next scheduled alarm.

Finally, there seems to be a little confusion about Daylight Savings Time as well. I don't think that London has DST but the default installation settings has London with DST set.

The next three comments I have are actually suggestions for Time. The other common feature lacking in Time is a stop watch. One with a with an easy to use interface, count-down stop watch and lap-timer would be quite a useful addition to Time. And the other thing is that they could add a small tick (or other mark) to the calendar to display that you have scheduled appointments on that date from the datebook. Clicking on that date automatically sends you to the corresponding date in your datebook. And of course you could have preferences options for which datebook app you wanted to call up if you didn’t use the standard datebook app. Too bad the screen size doesn't allow one to choose between a digital clock display or an analog one. I don’t think an Analog clock would look too good here, but it’s a thought for the developers to think about. Who knows eh?

Pros

• Very useful screen display, shows you everything you need on your desk, and still not feel cluttered or too small to read.
• Configurable alarms and easy to schedule repeating alarms.
• World clock and calendar displays are easy to use and not too complicated for the average guy.
• Documentation is sufficient and clearly written.
• Low price.

Cons

• Quirky behaviour in the alarms section
• No stop watch
• While it’s got a good display for the monthly calendar, it doesn't link up with your datebook.

Conclusion

So, would I recommend it? Yes. There are some small things in Time that could be improved, but if we can live with Windows, I think this is a small problem. If you keep your Palm V on in the cradle all the time, you can throw out the desktop clock your sister gave you and the calendar your company insurance agent distributed to all staff. A person might need to have AnaClock and ClockPro together, one for a desktop clock and the other for alarms, but with Time, well, I guess not anymore eh?

Rating

3 and a half Palm Babies. If the bugs (quirky behaviour) in the alarm section above are fixed in the next release, I think it deserves a rating of four Palm Babies.

Summary:

Available from: http://www.PalmGear.com (Real time fulfillment)
Price: Shareware US$8.00
Developer: Horace Ho
Developer Home Page: http://palm.pair.com
Requirements: Palm OS 2.0 and 27Kbytes free

Share this article:   f g t l