The main view of TreoAlarm shows the current time, the next alarm and the current weather. Conveniently is also displays when this weather report was retrieved. The weather forecast can be scrolled to the right, displaying the forecast for the next couple of days.
Setting the alarms and weather preferences is a breeze.
For the source of weather information TreoAlarm uses the
US National Weather Service,
Canadian Weather Office or
Yahoo! Weather. Instead of pulling
down the (large) HTML pages of these services, the TreoAlarm application
queries a script on
www.treoalarm.com
which extracts only the relevant data to be sent to the Treo. This makes
the download much smaller which speeds up the update and saved money. The
downside is that
www.treoalarm.com
caches the data for 15 minutes (if someone in the same city has also
requested a weather update within 15 minutes prior to your request,
www.treoalarm.com does not query
the source server) and it introduces an external dependency. I
would have opted to receive an RSS feed directly to the Treo. Such services
can be found on
www.rssweather.com and
www.anti-mega.com/weather/
but TreoAlarm currently does not support RSS feeds.
For the time synchronization the Time Procotol described in
RFC 868 is used. The time
server is not configurable and is set to
time-a.nist.gov. Although this
protocol is less accurate than NTP I found
my Treo in sync within a second of my NTP synced laptop.
When a alarm goes off, TreoAlarm shows it's own alarm pop-up. It does not use the PalmOS general notification manager. This means that 3rd party application like Butler will not notice the alarm. The largest area of the pop-up is a snooze button which makes the alarm re-appear in a few minutes (configurable per alarm). When the alarm is cancelled, you are returned to the application that was running before the alarm occured. When you select "Open Alarm" however, TreoAlarm is opened, and the weather forecast is shown. It is important to note that the Treo KeyGuard is temporarely disabled when the pop-up is shown. This makes it easy to snooze the alarm when you are not fully awake yet.
All in all TreoAlarm is a very usefull and fun application. It combines a simple yet effective alarm clock with realtime weather forecasts and time synchronization. It is still in beta, but the only thing I found wrong with it is that the icons displayed with the forecast can be quite off. Of course that could be because the Dutch weather is very unpredictable. ;-)