Looking for an alarm/reminder program for Gnome (or X)
Having decided that there's no application out there that can manage both my calendar/time management *and* my reminder/alarm requirements I've decided to look for a dedicated alarm program. My requirements are:- Must run in the background or be driven by cron so that alarms will appear regardless of what I'm doing (I will be running an X desktop but that's the only guaranteed thing, actually not quite, Firefox is always running too). When an event is due I want to be able to pop up daily reminders from a specified number of days before the event and to be able to stop them when I have 'done' what is required. I'd like the pop-up (flag, whatever) to be permanent until I acknowledge it, something like an icon in the Gnome Panel would be OK. Events need to be specified by date, time of day is unlikely to be significant. For most things a yearly repeat would be fine (e.g. a 'birthday' type reminder), I also have several which are quaterly but I'm prepared to deal with them by setting up four annual reminders if necessary. Kalarm seems to fulfil most of my criteria - any other ideas? Is there something more 'Gnome friendly' or generic maybe? A PIM or groupware application which can do this might be of interest but I will *not* be running it all the time so note the first criterion above. -- Chris Green
Erm you are already using Evolution aren't you for your phone ? I don't actually use the notifications myself as I tend to work my life off task lists rather than calendar events, but as far as I can recall it should tick most of your boxes. It should be integrated with the gnome calendar applet so even if Evolution isn't running you can check appointments in the desktop calendar and alarm notifications etc should still work. It all talks through some calDAV magic I think, so some evolution type things are running but not the full app.
On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 11:22:39AM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Erm you are already using Evolution aren't you for your phone ?
Actually, no. I played with it for a while and did get it to synchronise with my E71 but in the end I have moved to eGroupware which works rather better and is much more straightforward.
I don't actually use the notifications myself as I tend to work my life off task lists rather than calendar events, but as far as I can recall it should tick most of your boxes.
It should be integrated with the gnome calendar applet so even if Evolution isn't running you can check appointments in the desktop calendar and alarm notifications etc should still work. It all talks through some calDAV magic I think, so some evolution type things are running but not the full app.
OK, thanks, I'll take a look and that *might* be a reason to move back to Evolution and/or some mix with eGroupware and Gnome Calendar. -- Chris Green
On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 11:34:57AM +0100, Chris G wrote:
On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 11:22:39AM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
It should be integrated with the gnome calendar applet so even if Evolution isn't running you can check appointments in the desktop calendar and alarm notifications etc should still work. It all talks through some calDAV magic I think, so some evolution type things are running but not the full app.
OK, thanks, I'll take a look and that *might* be a reason to move back to Evolution and/or some mix with eGroupware and Gnome Calendar.
There's one fundamental problem, or at least I think there is, I can't see anyway to set up a repeating calendar event. I.e. I want to set up a calendar entry that repeats on the same day every year and allows me to add alarms to it. The alarms that one can attach to Evolution calendar entries seem pretty flexible and can do close to what I want. -- Chris Green
On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 12:10 +0100, Chris G wrote:
There's one fundamental problem, or at least I think there is, I can't see anyway to set up a repeating calendar event. I.e. I want to set up a calendar entry that repeats on the same day every year and allows me to add alarms to it.
In the new appointment window does it not have a recurrence button where you can set up the interval or does that break the alarms ?
On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 12:21:29PM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 12:10 +0100, Chris G wrote:
There's one fundamental problem, or at least I think there is, I can't see anyway to set up a repeating calendar event. I.e. I want to set up a calendar entry that repeats on the same day every year and allows me to add alarms to it.
In the new appointment window does it not have a recurrence button where you can set up the interval or does that break the alarms ?
So it does, thank you! I hadn't spotted that. -- Chris Green
On Wednesday 17 September 2008 10:40:48 Chris G wrote:
Having decided that there's no application out there that can manage both my calendar/time management *and* my reminder/alarm requirements I've decided to look for a dedicated alarm program. My requirements are:-
Must run in the background or be driven by cron so that alarms will appear regardless of what I'm doing (I will be running an X desktop but that's the only guaranteed thing, actually not quite, Firefox is always running too).
When an event is due I want to be able to pop up daily reminders from a specified number of days before the event and to be able to stop them when I have 'done' what is required. I'd like the pop-up (flag, whatever) to be permanent until I acknowledge it, something like an icon in the Gnome Panel would be OK.
Events need to be specified by date, time of day is unlikely to be significant. For most things a yearly repeat would be fine (e.g. a 'birthday' type reminder), I also have several which are quaterly but I'm prepared to deal with them by setting up four annual reminders if necessary.
Kalarm seems to fulfil most of my criteria - any other ideas? Is there something more 'Gnome friendly' or generic maybe?
A PIM or groupware application which can do this might be of interest but I will *not* be running it all the time so note the first criterion above.
Might be worth having a look at Remind <http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Remind>. It has a custom scripting language and can pull calendar information from various sources. It can send reminders to various sources too. So you could probably hook it up to libnotify (using notify-send, see your $ man notify-send for details) to make it fit well into X. But, to be honest, Chris, no one here *really* knows what you want except you. Try a few tools out, decide which one you like best and then go with it. That's part of the fun of this "choice" thing which free software types are often so passionate about. You could even post back your experiences to the list for general interest. And as a hint, I always find that a good place for searching for software tools for particular jobs is my distribution's package manager (in my case, APT on Debian). Cheers, Richard -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis JID: ironchicken@jabber.earth.li http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +-------------------------------------------------------+ |Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.| |http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html | +-------------------------------------------------------+
On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 11:24:34AM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote:
On Wednesday 17 September 2008 10:40:48 Chris G wrote: [snip]
Might be worth having a look at Remind <http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Remind>. It has a custom scripting language and can pull calendar information from various sources. It can send reminders to various sources too. So you could probably hook it up to libnotify (using notify-send, see your $ man notify-send for details) to make it fit well into X.
I've played with Remind on and off, it's still installed I think, I'll maybe take another look.
But, to be honest, Chris, no one here *really* knows what you want except you. Try a few tools out, decide which one you like best and then go with it. That's part of the fun of this "choice" thing which free software types are often so passionate about. You could even post back your experiences to the list for general interest.
Yes, I'm not looking for 'an answer' I'm just asking for hints about what may be worth looking at.
And as a hint, I always find that a good place for searching for software tools for particular jobs is my distribution's package manager (in my case, APT on Debian).
Hmm, bit difficult to guess names that might be good applications surely. Though I do something similar using the search facilities on Freshmeat, that also allows getting a bit more help by looking at how recently a program has been updated and how popular it is. That's often (Freshmeat that is) my first point of call when I'm looking for something, it's how I found eGroupware in fact, it's one of the hits you get when you search for 'syncml'. -- Chris Green
On Wednesday 17 September 2008 11:39:22 Chris G wrote:
On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 11:24:34AM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote:
And as a hint, I always find that a good place for searching for software tools for particular jobs is my distribution's package manager (in my case, APT on Debian).
Hmm, bit difficult to guess names that might be good applications surely.
apt-cache search searches in package descriptions too. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard Lewis JID: ironchicken@jabber.earth.li http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- +-------------------------------------------------------+ |Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.| |http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html | +-------------------------------------------------------+
participants (3)
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Chris G -
Richard Lewis -
Wayne Stallwood