Psion Epoc Time and Alarm application

The most timely miniature computers on the planet

The Psion Epoc Time and Alarm application provides eight alarms, a world map, city locations and much else.

The Time application has two views. The alarms, and the world map.

Alarm View

The alarm view shows date and time, a clock, and up to eight alarms. New alarms can have a text associated with them, and this text will also appear when the alarm sounds. Alarms can be edited, deleted, and disabled. A disabled alarm will not sound, but can be easily re-enabled when required. You can also view the next alarm due (Ctrl N), and also a list of previous alarms that have occurred (Ctrl P).

You can set your home city, the time and date, summer times, and specify which days of the week are to be considered work days. Alarm sound can be set for on, or off. You can also set alarms to be silent for periods of up to 24 hours, to allow for meetings or situations during which sound alarms are unwelcome (the external LED will still flash to warn of alarms).

You can set time formats to 12 hour or 24 hour clocks, and the date formats to US, European and International (year, month, day) forms.

Preferences can be set for the type of alarm sound (including your own recorded sounds). You can also have the alarm application suggest a time for all alarms, and set that suggested time to whatever you like. This can be handy if you typically start your appointments at a particular time of day.

When setting new alarms, your choices are to sound once only (on any day of the week), in the next 24 hours only, daily, weekly or workdays only. For weekly alarms, you can select the day of the week. You can test your selected alarm sound.

For alarms at unusual intervals (first Wednesday of each month, for example), you are better to use the Agenda application.

Add new alarm sounds to \system\apps\alarm

World Map

This displays a world map, and the time, and sunrise and sunset times, in your home city, and also in one other selected city. It also shows the international phone dial codes for the selected city, the time zone change to it, and the distance (in km, miles or nautical miles).

If the tool bar is enabled, it will show either an analog or a digital clock, and and you can change the clock type by touching the clock face. The digital clock includes the day and month.

You can add your own cities. In the edit field for all existing cities, you can also look up their latitude, longitude, area code and their offset from GMT. You can also add and delete countries, in case new countries are formed. If you look up a country, you will be told their capital city, and their international phone code.

Hide Your Alarm Text

Need to set an alarm, which might go off while you are away, but not have others see the reason for the alarm? Try setting the alarm in Agenda, but use an embedded Word file object to contain the text.

One Alarm Only

If you need to force an alarm to sound only once, set a second alarm for say a minute later. Set the second alarm to be Silent. This will cancel the sound of the first alarm until you cancel the silent alarm. Well, maybe. I think this actually fails. Suggested by Martin Guthrie at www.pscience5.net There is a third party workaround for this, and I'll update this once I find my note of it.

Quick and Dirty Timer

In Time on a Psion 7, hit Ctrl U for a new alarm, move the curor to the minutes, then use , and . to decrement and increment by one minute. Use left bracket and right bracket for ten minute changes. Makes an easy Timer substitute. On Psion 5 (or Revo) use M and . keys.

Task List Problems

If an alarm sounds while you have the task list open, use Tab to switch from the alarm screen, and close the task list. Task list disables application items, so you wouldn't be able to switch away from the time screen if you snooze the alarm.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Increment the snooze period for alarms by one minute with ? and M, or by five minutes with Space.

Steven Pemberton advises if you press 'space' too often, and snooze it too long, there is no way to go back, ie make the snooze shorter. However, you can't snooze longer than an hour, so hitting space repeatedly goes up to 60 mins. One more space will set it to zero again.

In Time on a Psion 7, hit Ctrl U for a new alarm, move the curor to the minutes, then use , and . to decrement and increment by one minute. Use left bracket and right bracket for ten minute changes. Makes an easy Timer substitute. On Psion 5 (or Revo) use M and . keys.

Ctrl+I (Ignore) returns you to the application you were using previously and snoozes alarm for five minutes.

Ctrl+N to see next alarm
Ctrl+P to see previous alarm (handy if you Esc it too soon).

This site will look much better in a browser that supports W3C web standards but it is accessible to any browser or internet device, including Psion Web and similar PDA or limited browsers. Netscape 4.x users - turn Style Sheets off. Your style sheet support is too broken to use (sorry).


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