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May 17, 2006 4:43 PM |
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If I were inclined to start a company, something that I've always thought about is a company that applies Apple-style design sensibilities to relatively mundane consumer products. My company's first product would be an alarm clock. I've probably owned a dozen alarm clocks in my life, and used a couple of dozen more, and every single one has had an atrocious interface. Even the best of them lacked what I would consider some basic requirements. Few of them leave me confident that I've set the alarm properly and it is actually going to go off when I intended it to. It is difficult for me to turn them off in the dark, much less be able to actually set the alarm in the dark. For those of us not inclined to snooze, I've never seen one with a disable button as readily accessible as the snooze bar, but that kills the alarm until the same time tomorrow. And if there are multiple alarms or weekday-only alarms or such, forget it - the interface is so difficult that you'll probably never use those features. Someday...
Update (May 02007): Hmmm, WidgetStation might be just the thing. Looking forward to its release. Labels: design 3 Comments:
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I will buy your alarm clock when you get it made. I owned an alarm for years that had a very convenient numeric keypad for input. Sadly, the device eventually ceased to operate and I am now stuck with analog controls, since I have never again seen a clock with a keypad.
Other features I would appreciate are date-aware alarms (i.e., custom holiday settings), and arbitrarily adjustable snooze times.
In truth, I would like a clock that supported a scripting language for ultimate customization, but such a function seems unlikely to be widely appreciated.
Hmmm... a Linux box in an alarm-clock-like form factor with an LCD screen... Self-written alarm clock software with scripting... that has real potential!
I came here from a link to your lisp in javascript page, and I saw this alarm clock comment. Right on.
When you build your clock, please make it so setting the alarm goes in increments of ten minutes. Nobody ever needs to wake up at EXACTLY 6:53, but you still have to go through all of those numbers on every alarm clock I've ever owned.