KitchenAlert for Maemo
KitchenAlert is a timer application for maemo5 (in practise Nokia's N900 device), designed to suite especially cooking and baking purposes. The latest version is 0.4.0.
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.
Features
and bugs
Multiple
timers can be run simultaneously. Timers can be saved. They can also be
set to be opened when the application starts (but this slows down the
startup significantly).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 doorbell ring. The loudness of the default sound is chosen on basis of not hurting your ears if using headphones at high volume. On noisy situations a louder sound may be needed.
The alert sound is 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. With loud music, the alarm may not be audible.
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.
The sound system of the device is restarted during install/update. Should the restart fail for any reason the device would be left completely mute. Restarting the device will restore the sounds.
New
in version 0.4.0
- timers can be set "sticky" (loaded automatically when the program starts)
- stopped (and non-started) alerts now show their full time (instead of 00:00:00) and "stopped" in status field
in version 0.3.0
- saving and loading of timers
in version 0.2.1
- the
alert sound can again be changed even if there are no alerts in the
list
in version 0.2.0
- improved and finger-friendlier user interface
- removing alerts from the list is now possible
- the
alert sound is now played also when MediaPlayer is playing. (Loud alert
sound may be needed for hearing it over the music, though.)
- alert sound no longer jams when several timers alert close to each other
- stopping one alert no longer silences all alerts
- zero
second alerts alert now
- a new default sound and a new desktop icon
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 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.