Never Be Late Anywhere Again With Place Clock
Place Clock ($0.99) by ocoomo is a location-based alarm clock app for your iPhone.
Let's admit it - the iPhone's default alarm clock is pretty decent, it fulfills the need to have something to wake you up or whatever, right? But how about if you're one of those people that needs various alarms at different locations? The default clock doesn't do anything for you - it requires you to manually toggle alarms on and off, and create new ones if they're not set already.
It's time to meet Place Clock.
The interface for Place Clock is very reminiscent of the default Clock app, and overall, it feels like something that Apple designed themselves. I give props to the developer.
The app is pretty much an extension of the iPhone's own default Clock app, but it adds a nice little feature: location awareness, among other tweaks.
Place Clock allows you to create two different types of alarms: Place Alarm and Time Alarm.
Place Alarms are alarms that will only be toggled on if you are within a certain location. When creating a new Place Alarm, you can add a new place either by Your Current Location or Address Lookup while in List View. If you're in the Map View, you can add both of the previous choices but there's another option for adding Current Map Location.
The Address Lookup option will also allow you to enter a precise address or a landmark name, such as a university, as seen in my screenshot. It won't do stuff like "Starbucks" since there are too many of them - stuff like this will require a precise address.
This is because there are always discrepancies between the actual GPS location and the map placement - choose whichever one fits you best. Additionally, once you have a location specified, you can also set the range - have it smaller if you want it to be specific to a certain location only, or make it wider to have it go off when you are just in the area.
The Place Alarms can be triggered by On Arrival, On Departure, or Within Range. So whatever you need, it should be covered by these three options. A delay can be set to have it begin after a certain amount of time.
The Time Alarm is just what you would already expect from the default Clock app, but with some more customization options, like setting the Snooze interval.
Both the Place and Time alarms allow you to have a repeating alarm, customize snooze by setting the interval, auto-shorten toggle, max and min snooze count, and max sound setting, which can be different from the default alarm sound.
In order for Place Clock to actually work by location triggers, the app will need location services to be running in the background. The developers state in the app description that on a 3GS, this setting is automatically disabled by default to compensate for the more power-consuming GPS chip in the 3GS, as well as worse battery life.
On an iPhone 4, I did notice that I was getting a bit of a drain on the battery, but that's because it was left on for most of the day. But this should be expected - anything that requires location will impact the battery life regardless.
If you are not comfortable with that, then Place Clock is probably not for you. However, if you have a need for multiple alarms throughout the day in various locations, then Place Clock is worth checking out, especially at the limited-time introductory price of $1.
