How Naggy Are iOS 5 Alarms?

[jeshyr]

iPhone users with iOS5, how is the alarm mechanism? Since my iPad is refusing to talk to my computer I can't upgrade it to iOS5 and this is a very important issue for me:

I need to take medications NINE times every day... impossible to remember Some of those times very depending what time I wake up, and others are fixed times during the day. I have been using the Android app "Alarm Clock Plus" for this. The features I use are:

• Very easy to set once-off alarms as well as daily repeating alarms


• Very naggy alarms which are hard to accidentally dismiss! This is the killer feature for me. I set the alarms to automatically "snooze" if I don't acknowledge them and to repeat alarming until I do acknowledge them manually. The alarm screen is about 90% "snooze" button with a fairly small "dismiss" button in the corner so if I hit a bit of the screen by mistake when I pick up the phone it's very unlikely to accidentally dismiss the alarm. Alarms also still go off when phone is in silent mode.

Since these medications are absolutely vital for me to be able to do stuff, I have to let the phone be very naggy about it!

I know in iOS4 I can't set an alarm that will continue to nag me unless I remember to leave that application active on the device when I turn it off and that's just not practical. How is iOS in this regard?

It's been instructive to have the Android phone to contrast with my iOS experience - everything is so different! At the moment naggy alarms are on my fairly short list of "things Android does better".

Cheers,
r

Comments

[hope]

For naggy alarms and easier-to-set alarms, I use an app called "Due". I'm fairly sure it does most/all of the things you've described, better than the native alarm.

Info here: http://www.dueapp.com/

[lauredhel]

Took the words right out of my mouth! Alarmed is the other third-party solution that might be worth a look.

[jeshyr]

Thanks for those suggestions, I'll have a look at both.

[afuna]

Hmm, well there are two different kinds of notifications with ios: alerts and banners. I've only had experience with banners which show up briefly and then get sent to the the notification center.

The notification center, you can always swipe down to view the latest $x notifications from an app (assuming you know which app)

But that's persistent, not naggy.

(which is to say, I don't quite know if it fits your needs, just describing what I see in case it helps you figure out yes/no)

[jeshyr]

Yeah, that's useful but insufficiently naggy. Looks like Due and Alarmed, referenced above, both fix that by auto-generating new alarms until you acknowledge one. And the Alerts look like iOS4 notifications so they're a bit more naggy there too which is good.

Looks promising :)

[thorfinn]

iOS4 had local notifications introduced at some point, I thought, so apps that use those don't have to to be active. They're definitely present in iOS5.