For quite some time now I’ve been working on an Android application in my spare time.  It is an alarm clock called Alarmed! and I released the beta version of it today.  This version is a free trial with a limited feature set.  You can find out more about it here.  The main feature of the application is the puzzle aspect.  When the alarm goes off the sound won’t stop until you’ve answered a set of questions, some simple maths questions and some short anagrams.  The questions start off simple by default but you can add more as you get better.  The idea is that by the time you’ve answered all the questions you should be properly awake!

Additional features are snooze and the ability to set the alarm to play a random song from a playlist in your music library.  The playlist feature will only be available in the upcoming full paid-for version which I’ll likely only charge a dollar (US) or two for.

Daniel just Pownced a link to Wordle, a very slick application for generating clouds of words from a bunch of text where the most frequent words are displayed the largest.  It has a nice interface for customizing the appearance of the resulting cloud with a good range of fonts and preset color schemes to tweak.  Also it’s a Java Applet which actually features smooth animation and decent graphic design / typography.  Definitely a candidate for the Cool Applets blog.

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Photo by raindog

I found out last week that I’ll be attending JavaOne in San Francisco in May. This is excellent news; I’ve not been to the US before, much less to a software conference of such magnitude. I’ll likely not be attending many of the presentations however as I’ll be busy in my role as ‘booth babe’. I’ll be promoting and demonstrating Altio, our core software product, most of the time and the rest of it trying to work out how to crash the Google party.

Photo by timsamoff