Alarm++ places an icon in the system tray (also known as the tray notification area).
When you first install Alarm++, the icon probably looks like this because there are no alarms yet.
When there is an active alarm, it looks like this:
If you hover your mouse over the tray icon, it will display the name, date, and time of the next event in a tooltip.
The tray icon can indicate a couple of other states as well.
You can pause Alarm++ so that it won't allow any event to go off. It will act, basically, as if time has stopped. You might want to do this when you're playing a full-screen game, for example, and don't want any alarms to interrupt your playing. When you resume Alarm++, any alarms that would have gone off will then go off.
If Alarm++ is paused, the icon changes to display the "VCR pause" symbol.
When an alarm goes off, it's possible for an error to occur. E-mail service might not be available; Alarm++ might not be able to find the specified sound file; or the script that was set to run might be missing. When an error occurs, Alarm++ logs it so that you can correct it later. Alarm++ indicates that it has logged a new error by highlighting the tray icon face color in yellow. After you view the log, Alarm++ removes the yellow highlight.
Left-click the icon and Alarm++ will display the main window. You will need to access the main window to edit alarms, delete alarms, customize Alarm++, and more.
Right-click the icon and Alarm++ will display its context menu. With the context menu, you can display the main window, create an alarm, display the online help, and pause Alarm++.
Double-click the icon and Alarm++ will create a new alarm based on the default template.
Let's create an alarm. Double-click on the Alarm++ system tray icon. The property pages of the new alarm are displayed, like this:
Enter a name for the alarm and the message you want displayed. You can use the buttons on the right to make text bold, underline, and italics; you can use different typefaces, colors, and sizes; you can also set add bullets and set line alignment.
Select a date and time for the alarm to go off. The date is set to the current date by default, and the time is set to the next half hour mark.
Click the OK button.
By the way, an alarm can have more than one event—it can repeat every day, every third month, and many other ways. The one you just created has only one event though. We'll talk about repeating events later.
When the alarm goes off, an event window is displayed (unless you specify otherwise, but we'll talk about that later).
The date/time at the top is when the event was scheduled to go off. This is different from the current time if you've snoozed the event.
The date/time below the Snooze field is when the event will go off again if you click the Snooze button.
The date/time below the buttons is when the next event is scheduled to go off. If there are no more events for this alarm, that area will be blank.
You can click the Snooze button so that the same event window will be displayed again, or you can click the OK button to dismiss the event window. (If the alarm has repeating events, they will all go off when they should—the Off button only affects this event.)
You can also click the Properties button in the upper-right corner and edit the alarm's properties.
And, of course, the Help button brings up the online help for event windows.
At some point, you may want to edit an alarm, to change the message, to modify the repeat interval, to select a new sound file, whatever.
You've already seen an easy way to edit the alarm from its event window—click on the Properties button in the upper-right corner.
If you want to edit an alarm and you don't happen to have its event window displayed at the moment, you can open Alarm++'s main window and edit any of your alarms from there.
First, left-click on the Alarm++ tray icon. This displays the main window with lists of alarms and alarm templates you have. Templates are displayed in the left pane of the Alarm++ main window; alarms are displayed in the right pane. Now you can double-click on the alarm (or template) you want to edit.
For details on the main window, see the Main Window topic.