PeterRemembering things. It's something that a lot of us aren't all that good at, without having something to trigger us.
KAlarm is an application which is designed to allow you to set certain things to happen at certain times. If that sounds a bit vague, let me borrow some text from the official site:
KAlarm is a personal alarm message, command and email scheduler. It provides a graphical interface to set up personal alarm messages which pop up on the screen at the chosen time, or you can schedule commands to be executed or emails to be sent.
After installing the program and launching, you are presented with a fairly basic list of your set up alarms window and it also installs itself in the system tray.
Creating a new alarm is easy, simply click the New button on the toolbar (or use the menu, or the system tray icon for that matter). You have a choice of displaying some text when the alarm goes off (type it in or choosing an existing file), running a command of your choice or sending an email.
Each screen works pretty much as you'd expect it to, and it's simple to get it to do what you want it to do at the specified time. The addition of running a custom command when the alarm goes means the possibilities for what you can do with KAlarm are pretty much endless.
There's also a Try button that you can use to test out your visual alert if that's what you've got set up.
Of course, it's certainly possible to schedule tasks using cron or at. KAlarm can effectively duplicate this functionality, but its obvious advantages lie in reminding you things, especially visually, while you're logged into KDE and putting it all into an easy-to-use graphical interface.
I like KAlarm. It's simple, yet powerful. It might not be awfully exciting, but ultimately, it gets the job done and can be extended to make it perform how you want. For that reason, I'm giving KAlarm a 7/10 on our new FOSSwire Review Rating system!
KAlarm is designed for KDE, but should work on pretty much every X11-based environment.
