KitchenAlert for Maemo
KitchenAlert is a timer application for maemo5 (in practise Nokia's N900 device), designed to suite especially cooking and baking purposes. An early version (0.1) is available.
Playing music overrides the alert, and the alert sound is not played. 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. Even more so if using the default sound, which is not really as loud or clear as it should be.
Features and bugs
The
alert will not be played if the device is playing another sound thatr
overrides it, e.g. when playing music with mediaplayer.Multiple timers can be run simultaneously. However, if timers alert very close to each other, the alert sound can be jammed (silences) and won't recover. So no sound for alerts after that until you restart the application. Also, running several timers for several hours may drain your battery.
The alarm sound can be set by the user. Any sound file type supported by the platform (e.g. mp3, vaw, aac (used in ringtones)) can be used. If you want to use an .ogg file, you need to have the package ogg-support installed on your N900. You can even set an mp4 video as the alert sound, and the program will use its audio stripe.
A default alarm sound is also provided. The current one is modified from a public domain birdssound from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Download
You can install KitchenAlert on your N900 from the extras-devel repository. However, as usual for this repositories, it's not necessarily safe: keep in mind the above cautions on volume settings, losing alert sound and battery drain. Remember to close the repository after installing to avoid unwanted updating of your applications to development versions.
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome on the application's garage project page.