These are some of the ways you can personalize Alarm++ to make it better suit your needs and style.
Use the Options command on the Setup menu to customize various aspects of Alarm++, such as:
See the Options topic for more details.
Use the Workdays command on the Setup menu to customize the days that Alarm++ considers workdays and non-workdays. Alarm++ uses this information when calculating event dates if you've set the “Only on workdays...” or “Never on workdays...” option on the alarm's Advanced page.
Workdays are the days of the week that you normally work. You might want to change the defaults if you work Sundays or Saturdays, or only work a three-day week, things like that.
Non-workdays are the days that you're on vacation, you're sick, it's a holiday, or the office is closed for some other reason. You can add those days to this list.
See the Workdays topic for more details.
When Alarm++ is installed, it creates a shortcut in your Startup group. You can modify this shortcut so that it opens a specific alarm file. (This usually isn't necessary though, because of the “Open the most recent alarm file at startup” option, which is discussed below.
By default, Alarm++ saves your first alarm file in your My Documents folder with the name MyAlarms.alarm (if you don't already have a file by that name).
Usually, you want Alarm++ to start when Windows® boots. To do this, you can use one of the following methods:
For example: alarm.exe “C:\My Documents\MyAlarms.alarm”
For example: “C:\My Documents\work.alarm”
If you want to have more than one alarm file active, you can run Alarm++ more than once and open different alarm files.
Note: You can maintain more than one alarm file. You can even run multiple instances of Alarm++, each managing a different alarm file. However, I expect this scenario would be rare.
The shortcut is also where you can place command line switches to modify Alarm++'s operation.
You can pass the filename of the alarm file you want to open. Remember to put quotation marks around the pathname if it has spaces in it. For example:
alarm.exe “c:\My Documents\TV Shows.alarm”
This tells Alarm++ to display the main window when it starts, instead of automatically hiding it.
For example, “alarm.exe –show MyStuff.alarm” starts Alarm++, opens the alarm file named MyStuff.alarm, and keeps the main window visible. This overrides the selection made in Options. (See below.)
This tells Alarm++ to start in Pause mode. This can be useful if you know that many alarms are going to go off when you start (for instance, if you've been on vacation for two weeks), and you'd prefer to view your alarm list and skip some of them before they go off.
After you've made your changes, you can right-click the Tray icon and select the Resume command to let Alarm++ operate as usual.
When Alarm++ is started with this switch, it will create a log file on the user's Desktop.
This command is useful for debugging, in the (unlikely) event that there's an issue.