Turning off alarm (half asleep) is too easy
asked 2014-10-28 23:25:46 +0300
After some months of using my Jolla as alarm clock, my index finger has learnt very well to turn off the alarm without me looking at the display, even when I am still half asleep. I think it is just too easy: as soon as the hand has located the phone, it is just a tiny drag to turn it off, anywhere on the display. This can bear two problems
- turning off alarm before really awake and falling asleep again
- phone not oriented as expected, thus turning off alarm when actually wanting to snooze it (related: Alarm clock: Alarm unintuitive)
I am not someone who needs to do a math calculation to wake up, but I would prefer if it was a bit harder. E.g. having to look at the user interface (and thus the current time) to operate the alarm controls. E.g. Sony's horizontal slider has always worked fine for me.
An easy solution would be to not put the phone right next to you, so you would need to already get up before being able to turn the alarm off. On a regular alarm clock, all you need to do is hit a button to snooze/turn it off, which I would say isn't much harder than selecting 'snooze' or 'dismiss' (forgot the exact terms used) on the screen of the phone. To me, this seems more like a 'bug' in the human than in the software, and one which doesn't really need to (and maybe can't?) be 'fixed'.
nthn ( 2014-10-29 00:45:54 +0300 )editI've had trouble waking up with the Jolla alarms too. For me, the problem is that the maximum possible alarm volume is too quiet, no matter how grating of an alarm tone I choose, and the alarm is not persistent enough, so I can just sleep right through the whole thing without even turning it off. On my n900, I used to use SleepAnalyzer to overcome this, as it would use the motion sensor to time the alarm for a more-awake portions of my sleep period. EvilAlarm was another option --- you had to solve a puzzle to turn off the alarm. I don't think either of those are available for Sailfish at the moment, but there might be some equivalent in the Jolla store, or one of the Android stores.
thebat137 ( 2014-10-29 06:14:09 +0300 )edit@nthn software for humans should adapt to humans needs. Muscle memory is not a bug, it is important for improving our manual skills. Another easy solution would be not use Jolla as an alarm clock ;-) Regarding snooze buttons, yes, they are usually easy to operate - I think they are actually designed to be easily operated. But turning off the alarm is most often implemented in a less easy way, minimizing the risk of accidentally turning off when just wanting to snooze.
tokaru ( 2014-10-29 10:06:22 +0300 )editFrom a developer's point of view: does SailfishOS provide an API which allows to implement a custom alarm clock? I.e. to register a custom application to be invoked similar to Jolla's default alarm application?
tokaru ( 2014-10-29 10:10:54 +0300 )editPerhaps I should post a separate question (slightly off topic), but I don't have this problem - the problem I have is that I sometimes snooze the alarm by mistake, then want to cancel the snooze. As far as I can see there is no way to do this without waiting for the alarm and then turning it off. Is there a way?
Ryan ( 2014-10-29 11:03:11 +0300 )edit