Alarm Clock Applet

Repeat option for timers? (feature request)

Asked by Enrico Sciascia

I saw question #31703, but its answer is not general enough.
With cron, we can just make things happen at absolute times; repetitions can only be specified by using wildcards for some fields in the cron time spec. For instance, we can exec a command at 1:15:12, 2:15:12, ...; we cannot exec a command at 1:15:12, 1:22:12, ... (i.e., 7 min apart). Starting multiple cronjobs would only work when the interval we want divides exactly the next larger cron unit of time--besides from being a pretty clumsy way of doing things.

My reason for wanting this is simple: I work for x minutes on whatever my main project happens to be at the time, then I switch to smaller tasks, make phone calls, or just rest for y<x minutes, then restart the cycle.
I'd like a notification at the end of x, then another one at the end of y, each of them repeating every (x+y) min.
Pretty simple, and I guess one could write some scripts on top of cron to make it happen by adding (x+y) to the current system time, but it'd be nice if the alarm-clock-applet did the math for me.

Johannes, is there any chance this might get added in an upcoming version?
Thanks,
E

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Johannes H. Jensen (joh) said : 		#1

Hmm, interesting use case. I believe you can achieve something like this with 0.3.1 though, by combining timers and snooze:

1. Create a timer for x minutes (or only a couple of seconds)
2. When it goes off, open the alarms list and select the timer in question
3. Click the arrow next to the Snooze button and select "Custom..."
4. In the dialog which appears, enter x minutes
5. The next time the timer goes off, right click the alarm clock icon and select "Snooze all alarms"

The timer will now go off every x minutes.

Unfortunately this technique won't scale to two alarms :-P

If you'd like to see repeat of timers in an upcoming version, please consider creating a blueprint for the feature (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/alarm-clock). With a more detailed spec, it's more likely to be implemented ;-)

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