Pester 1.1b3 [DO NOT REDISTRIBUTE]
17 February 2003

A simple alarm clock and timer for Mac OS X.

Written by Nicholas Riley <mailto:pester@sabi.net>.
Obtain updates from <http://web.sabi.net/nriley/software/>.

Note: This documentation is not yet updated for version 1.1, though most of it should still apply; please read the release notes at the end for a listing of what has changed in this version.

What is it?

Miss your bus or train?  Have a meeting coming up soon and want to be reminded of it?  Too much trouble to create an appointment in Palm Desktop, iCal or Entourage?  Pester can help.

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Installation

Pester should work on Mac OS X 10.1 or later; it has been tested on Mac OS X 10.1.5 and 10.2.1.

To install Pester, simply drag the Pester icon to your Applications folder or another convenient location. If you use Pester often, drag it to the Dock or add it to your Login Items.

If for some reason you find Pester not to your liking, remove it by dragging its icon to the Trash. Pester’s preferences file is named “net.sabi.Pester.plist” and is located in the Library: Preferences subfolder of your Home folder.

Usage

Use Pester to set alarms for times in the future. Alarms that are scheduled to expire after you quit Pester are saved automatically. Pester must be running in order to notify you that an alarm has expired. If an alarm expires while Pester isn’t running, you will not be notified, but the alarm’s time will be “«expired»” in Pester’s alarm list.

To set an alarm, click the Pester icon, choose “Set Alarm…” from the Alarm menu, or press ⌘N, and the Set Alarm window (shown above) will appear.

First type a message if you wish, otherwise the rather unimaginative “Alarm!” will be used.  Recent messages you’ve used appear in the menu; if you mistype or want to remove a message, click the “–” button.  To remove the all recent messages from the menu, click “– All”.

To specify the alarm time in seconds, minutes or hours from now, click the “in” radio button, then type a number and pick a unit from the popup menu.  To quickly pick one of the units from the keyboard, type S, M or H after typing a number.

To specify an absolute time, click the “at” radio button, type a time and date.  If you’re outside the US, the time format may not be what you expect; I’m sorry, but a multitude of date-related Cocoa bugs make supporting localization very difficult.  In addition to typing numbers, you can select a relative date from the menu to the right of the date field, or type words such as:

Time: “morning”, “noon”, “afternoon”, “dinner”, “midnight”
Date: “today”, “tomorrow”, “next Thursday”, “November”

The text at the bottom left corner of the window changes as you type to indicate whether the date and time you’re typing is valid.

When an alarm expires, Pester’s dock icon bounces once, your Mac beeps, and Pester displays a dialog box:
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To view or remove alarms, choose “All Alarms…” from the Alarm menu or press ⌘L. 
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Alarms shown as “«expired»” expired while Pester was not running. As alarms are set, they appear in the list; alarms which expire while Pester is running are removed from the list. To remove one or more alarms, select them and click Remove.

More features

Pester includes a Dock menu, which you can access by Control (⌃)-clicking Pester’s icon.
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From this menu, you can view information about the next alarm, open the Set Alarm window, or open the Alarms window.  The number of alarms is shown in parentheses.

Pester’s dock icon displays the time until the next alarm expires.
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Pester is also fully Y3K-compliant. It can be comforting to know that even if you won’t be around then, if your Mac still works, so will Pester. 

Frequently asked questions

Q. Why isn’t Pester a full-featured calendar/scheduling program? What use is it otherwise?

A. I wrote and use Pester on my Mac for the same reason I use programs such as BigClock and TikTok on my Palm, the built-in clock on my Newton and the alarm on my cellular phone. Sometimes all you want is an alarm to go off in 5 minutes, not an “appointment” or “meeting” entry that survives in perpetuity and is synchronized with your phone, PDA and iPod. On the other hand, if you’re happy with what you’re using, stick with it.

Q. OK, but why doesn’t Pester have feature X?

A. I didn’t need it. I have looked at (and even registered) some similar programs such as Alarm Clock Pro, Alarm Clock S.E., CountDown, Tea Timer and the like. None of them did what I wanted. Please check out those other programs first; if Pester comes closest to your ideal but is missing a key feature, let me know and I’ll consider adding it.

Q. Under what conditions is the source code licensed?

A. Please see my Web page for details. Essentially: don’t pass it off as your own, and give me credit if you use all or part of it in your own software.

Version history

1.1 / forthcoming
•	Fixed small memory leaks on alarm creation and with the “Remove” button in the alarm list window.
•	Fixed vertical resizing of the alarm list window.
•	Fixed ‘s’, ‘m’, ‘h’ shortcuts for selecting alarm interval so they work regardless of the insertion point position.
• Fixed time remaining in the dock being wrong by one second, or showing «expired».
• Fixed empty messages appearing in the alarm message combo box.
•	Fixed display of time intervals between 24 and 48 hours: now “One day” instead of “1 days”.
• Fixed alarms not expiring after you put your Mac to sleep and wake it up again.
• Added better indications when a duration value is out of range (okay, Nat? :)
•	Added more keyboard navigation, type-selection, sorting and iTunes-like row coloring to the alarm list window.
•	Ellipsize long alarm messages in the alarm list window.
•	Added Delete keyboard shortcut for removing alarms to the alarm list window.
•	Added in-application read me viewer with section navigation, instead of opening TextEdit.
•	Retain highlighted alarms in the alarm list window when alarms are added, removed or resorted.
•	Removed horizontal scroll bar from the alarm list window because it wasn’t ever available.
•	Worked around many Cocoa bugs to provide support for non-US date and time formats.
•	Worked around Cocoa bugs with British and US “PM”/“pm” in some configurations: date formats wouldn’t “stick”, and would be reset when you tabbed through that field.
•	Fixed text display with non-Roman systems
•	Only show set alarm window when Pester comes to the front if an alarm isn’t in the process of expiring.
•	Added customizable alerts: the previously-mandatory notification dialog box, alert sound and dock bouncing are now all optional, and AppleScript, speech, and playback of sounds, images and movies (anything QuickTime can handle) are new. View alerts for scheduled alarms as help tags in the alarm list window.
• Only bring Pester to the front if needed for the type of alert selected; if Pester was hidden or not in front before an alarm expired, it switches back and hides if necessary after the alarm is dismissed. (This means you can dismiss an alarm by clicking or pressing the return key and go right back to work.)
• Added simple repeating alarms. When “Display Message and Time” is checked, each time the alarm expires you have the choice to stop it repeating; otherwise, remove the alarm from the alarm list between expirations. This works well for things like “remind me every 15 minutes to take a break”. An alarm won’t start to repeat until the alerts have finished going off and you dismiss it, so you won’t come back to several thousand alerts!
• Added a “snooze” feature; works similarly to the with ‘u’ shortcut.
•	Added a popup calendar to the Set Alarm window and the “snooze until” sheet.
•	Added ⇧⌘T shortcut to switch between “in” and “at”.
•	Default to today’s date in the “at” section.
• Reduced Pester’s processor usage while alarms are pending, and while the “Set Alarm” window is open but hidden.
• Worked around spurious “Could not find sound type for directory” being logged to console.log when you select an item to play which isn’t a system sound.
•	Changed alarm storage to be more reliable, expandable and human-readable, if a bit slower. Conversion occurs at startup and is one-way (if you really need it to be two-way, the feature would not be hard to add).  The alarm list should no longer become lost with a message such as “2002-11-18 00:31:24.461 Pester[8545] An error occurred while attempting to restore the alarm list: *** Incorrect archive: unexpected byte”.
• Switched to apple-generic versioning (agvtool, etc.).  December 2002 or later Dev Tools are required to build Pester 1.1.

Known bugs in this version (not to be fixed by 1.1):
• Selecting or typing a weekday with a name containing a hyphen (e.g., Brazilian “next sexta-feira”) or a space (Gaelic “next Dé Céadaoin”) causes the date field to be invalid. I may not be able to fix this without reimplementing the Cocoa date parser; an alternative would be to use US (or Portuguese?) date formats for Brazilian input; any suggestions for Gaelic?
• Type-selection of alarms by their dates and times in the alarm list only works well when the items in the list are in approximate alphabetical order; this breaks with certain date and time formats.
• After changing the date or time format in System Preferences, you must quit and reopen Pester for your changes to take effect.  As Apple’s own iCal also exhibits this issue, I don’t believe it is urgent.

Still to be fixed for 1.1:
• Note somewhere in the app or readme that autowake can interfere with EyeTV, which resets the timer immediately before each sleep (so do we, so it’s order-sensitive; Apple really needs to implement a systemwide scheduler service for this). Warn that Pester must be running in order to go off at the appointed time. Test interaction with screen savers.
•	The dock icon still sometimes displays «expired» briefly; this is an artifact of the new timer implementation.
•	Alarm times can be off by up to one second in certain cases.
• Preference for dock display and forced window reordering?
•	Handle alarm restoration failure (finish implementing PSError, test cases).
•	Figure out why, sometimes, alarms stay as expired, end up in the 'expired' section of the prefs, and never get removed

Additional features planned for later versions:
• Better repeating alarms, such as a “real time” option so you can schedule an alarm to go off every hour, on the hour, for example.
• Better handling of expired alarms—offer the option to have the alarms go off when Pester is restarted.
•	Alarms (unscheduled ones, at least) as documents.
• Notifications before an alarm goes off, as in xalarm.
• Full localization of all text in the application, not just date and time formats.
• User interface overhaul (Philippe, I am not forgetting :-)

[Two rereleases of 1.0 had no changes in the Pester application itself; they fixed problems with double-clicking the Read Me, so the version number was not changed.]

1.0 / 14 October 2002
Added alarm list, saved alarms, dock icon/menu, live alarm time, other features.

1.0d1 / 9 October 2002
First public release.

Acknowledgments

Pester uses code from Dan Wood’s TableTester examples, Tony Arnold’s iTableView and AMToolTipTableView.

Pester uses portions of Raphael Sebbe’s excellent SpeechUtilities. Thanks Raphael!

Pester uses BDAlias, for which the following conditions apply:

Copyright © 2001, bDistributed.com, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

•	Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
•	Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
•	Neither the name of bDistributed.com, Inc. nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. 

Pester includes software developed by The Omni Group. Unmodified versions of this software are available at http://www.omnigroup.com/community/developer/sourcecode/.