Feel free to fork/contribute at your leisure.
http://github.com/zachleat/ALARMd

If you’re new, you can check out ALARMd.com to see what I’m talking about.

Take a look at the Dingbats section on fontsquirrel to get your brain going in the same direction.

See ALARMd on Google Code.

Update: added Metric and Unit Circle time formats.

I know, some of you are reading this and thinking to yourself — genital herpes is more appealing than yet another online alarm clock. But to that I say, congratulations, that’s one of the new features in ALARMd 2!

Why did I make another online alarm clock? Mostly due to missing features and limitations in the old version, but also because it’s a good exercise in JavaScript programming and User Interface design. Everyone likes to hone their skills, and this is my publicly viewable work desk. But the real reason I went back to rewrite the old version is that I’m hooked on jQuery. I can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet, source code, and couldn’t stand to see my old, crusty, handwritten DOM manipulations polluting web browsers across the world. Users of the Yahoo User Interface Library (what I used for the original version of ALARMd) would do well to consider jQuery a nice plugin to be used alongside YUI. It will clean up your code MAX_INT-fold.

Here are a few new features and addressed limitations in ALARMd 2.

• Easy Alarm Mode: No more fumbling around when you just want one simple easy-to-add alarm.
• Google Calendar Alarm Mode: Customize your alarm schedule to your heart’s content, it will load your alarms straight from a publicly available Google Calendar. There are some great features with this:
  • Load only the first calendar event of every day
  • Day Limiter (Example: Only load calendar events within the next 3 days)
  • Minute Adjuster (Example: Alarm me 90 minutes before work without adding a separate event)
  • Google does a nice job of normalizing dates as well, so you don’t have to worry about calendar time syncing. If it says 8AM on your calendar, it’s going to alarm you at 8AM on your computer’s local time.
• New Clock Formats:
  • Human Readable Clock Format: Think “Half Past Two”, or “Quarter Til Twelve”. This idea is from Laurence Willmott’s Project “It’s about Time”. I took some liberties with his labeling scheme, I hope he doesn’t mind too much.
  • Metric Time Format: Shows the measurement Centi-days in Local Metric Time. Basically, it’s a percentage of much of the day has passed. If it’s 80.000, 80 percent of the day has passed, which coincides with 7:12 PM.
  • Unit Circle Time Format: Displays the time in radians that would be shown if a clock were pasted on top of a unit circle. If it’s 12 o’clock, it will read π/2. After programming this one, it’s starting to seem normal in my brain. Oh, it’s 3π/2? Time to eat dinner. How the hell did it get 2π/3??
• Human Readable Alarm Dates: Think “29 Minutes”, “1 Hour”, “2 Days Ago”.
• Much cleaner interface, using a jQuery accordion to display the options.
• The old ALARMd required an internet connection for all sources, and provided no safeguard if your internet went down whilst you were sleeping. ALARMd 2 preloads all Youtube videos in the background when the page loads using the new Youtube JavaScript API. A nice benefit of this is that the browser window no longer requires focus to play the YouTube video.
• Less clunky interface for adding new alarm sources.
• Repeat option for YouTube videos and MP3′s. Turn infinite loop on or off. Careful with this one. Don’t leave ALARMd going if you’re not going to be home when it goes off.
• CSS Skins, Use the really simple ones I’ve included for Red, Green, or Blue, or include your own URL to your own hosted CSS file. Have a good skin? I’ll include it in the select list and give you some props here, just link to it in the comments below. Use some CSS class hooks to spice up your skins (they are mutually exclusive). These are CSS classes that are added to the body tag to allow you to style the alarm differently depending on the alarm clock’s current state. Future enhancements might include more than just alarm-based hooks: Year, day of the year, and hour of the day might be useful, that way you could style the clock to show a lighter background during the day and a darker background at night.
  • .alarmWithin30Minutes
  • .alarmWithin15Minutes
  • .alarmWithin5Minutes
  • .alarmWithin1Minute
  • .alarmActive (Alarm is being played)
• Still has all the old favorites:
  • Test Button to make sure the video or source is working and to check your volume.
  • Count Down mode to show the time between now and the first alarm.
  • Store your own list of alarm sources, using YouTube, MP3, Last.FM, or any URL (Pandora is included).
  • Military time (24 hour clock) and seconds toggle.
  • Naked mode (get rid of the extras)

Finished reading? I’m surprised you didn’t click the link at the top: ALARMd 2 Beta

Remember, this is BETA. That means it’s new. I’ve done my best to test and code out all the kinks, but there may be a few that slipped through. Try it out and please report any bugs. And once again, this code is released under the BSD license.

I’ll probably move this to the main ALARMd.com domain shortly.

Alarmd has been personally tested with Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3.1, and Opera 9.27, all on Windows. Google GDATA reports an unsupported browser error on Safari and Opera, which you can hide using custom CSS.

I added this to use maLArquee as an alarm. For instance you can try adding this one to your ALARMd for a nice wake up message.

http://www.zachleat.com/Projects/Malarquee/index.html?text=Jnxr%2520hc!!!

Of course the obvious downfall of this approach is that your target website would need sound if you wanted to actually use it to wake up. But you could also use it to open up a new window at a specific time to prank a friend, coworker, or loved one. Try setting up ALARMd to use a naked lady website as a target url on your coworkers computer and set the time for right after lunch! Or open ALARMd up on your colleague’s computer and get it to open a competitor’s website during a big presentation to the company president.

Fun to be had by all, I’m sure.

The day I sent the link to the LifeHacker editor, I purchased the alarmd.com domain. My thoughts on the domain were that I should have it just in case I decided to host the clock on the domain for easy access, and I certainly didn’t want anyone else to have it. That turned out to be a good idea since an unnamed internet charlatan purchased a similar domain mere hours after I had purchased mine and pointed it to his website. This same person was going onto various blogs and websites where ALARMd had been posted saying that it was a ripoff of his site, which of course was not true. I’m sure he got some traffic from it, and certainly am curious about the liberties he takes with the truth just to make a buck. Obviously I am not going to post a link to his website, since I do not want him to receive any traffic to his Google Ads machine. I hope that you, as a reader of my website, will trust that anything linked to this guy’s name is not worth any of your time.

The link was posted to LifeHacker, and my meager website went from an average of 50 hits a day to receiving 87000 hits in two weeks. In the end, I got more visitors from stumbleupon than LifeHacker, which is really a testament to that website’s popularity.

It was on delicious popular bookmarks for a while. It actually also ended up being on television. I know, I know, it seems ridiculous to even put websites on television, but it was. A lady named Erin O’Hearn does a segment called “Right Now on the Net” for Channel 6 Action News in Philadelphia. She had a blurb about it and you can even watch it here [Skip to 1:07]. I guess it was also on an internet radio show called “Techtalk Radio” and was featured as their site of the week. You can listen to that podcast here [Skip to 47:09], even though they pronounce my name “Zach-A-Lot” and are obsessed with the “Naked” checkbox. But to be fair, who isn’t obsessed with Naked checkboxes?

And just recently, I put up the alarmd.com domain as a redirect to the site for all the hard-core users still going to it and using it. It’s still getting a couple of hundred hits a day.

So, hindsight. The alarm clock is a device that everyone uses and easily relates to, but also a device that people have low expectations for. Most alarms only have one or two times they go off for, and with only a few options for alerting: buzzer or radio. Most go off every day, even on the weekends when you want to sleep in. But people put up with their crappy alarm clocks because there is literally no good alarm clock hardware out there. And some of the features I’ve put into ALARMd can also be seen in alarm clocks that cost over $100 USD. Ridiculous. I would bet that there is a huge market for someone to come out with an alarm clock that does suck and costs $40, or maybe people just want to use their cell phones all the time. I wonder if the iPhone alarm is any good. Look for my next project, which will be just as, if not more, retarded as the Internet Alarm Clock.

Did you take your contacts out last night and you can’t see the time on your alarm clock from all the way across the room?

I’m here to calm your fears. Enter ALARMD, the Internet Alarm Clock. Wake up to any Youtube video (that allows embedding), a last.fm user stream or tag, or any mp3 hosted online. There are a few defaults in there, but you can add and modify your own.

Features:

• Supports multiple alarms (ALT+R to add an alarm or use the Add Alarm button).
• Options for 24 Hour (Military) time and Seconds display
• Supports MP3 (hosted online), YouTube videos (that allow embedding), and last.fm user or tag streams.
• Key Mash Mode to kill the alarm (hit five random keys in one second)
• Time Font Size customization (automatically size to the width of the window using the Max option)
• Typical alarm clock colors: Red, Green, or Blue
• Alarm Toggle based on the Day of the Week
• Test button to make sure your speaker volume is set correctly.
• Sleep Mode button to get rid of the extra GUI while you don’t need it.
• Save all of your settings, URL’s, and alarms locally in a cookie (you don’t need yet another account to use this)

Things to think about:

• Power Settings – disable your screen saver, or any sort of automatic suspend or sleep setting. In my testing, having your monitor go into power save mode is acceptable, and the alarms will still sound (but you might want to test this yourself and leave a comment with your result).
• You might not want to use with a CRT, for fear of burn in.
• Personally, I like to use this in Opera, just because their default full screen mode (F11) doesn’t have toolbars or a status bar. But you can use the Fuller Screen Firefox plug-in to soup up your Firefox for similar functionality.
• Word of warning, the window must have focus to autoplay YouTube videos.
• Make sure your local time on your computer is correct, especially if you are traveling between time zones. It doesn’t do any server side validation on the time (yet?).

Possible Future Improvements:

• Countdown mode, displays amount of time until next alarm in place of the clock (good for timed presentations, where you want to see how much time is left before you have to quit).
• Google Gears integration for offline mode (if your internet goes out during the night)
• Support customizing source URL’s on a per alarm basis.
• Support days of the week toggle on a per alarm basis.
• Support user specified color customization.
• A crescendo alarm MP3 that increases in volume for a more peaceful wake up experience.
• An alarm MP3 with especially violent noises for heavy sleepers.
• An alarm MP3 of my mom’s voice to get that nice feeling of childhood back.

This internet application was built using the Yahoo UI Libraries (YUI) and Jack Slocum’s Ext DomQuery class. It is written entirely without using any server side programming languages, and therefore can be saved to your local machine. Not that anyone might want to use the Internet Alarm Clock, but if you do, I declare it officially released under the BSD license. Just don’t forget to cite the source when you redistribute.

Update: added a couple more things to think about.