Pester 1.0.1
14 October 2002

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/>.

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 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

1.0.1 / 14 October 2002
Added repeating timers.

[Two rereleases of 1.0 had no changes aside from fixing problems with accessing the Read Me, so the version number was not incremented.]

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.