For all those who find it a significant challenge to rise out of slumber in the mornings to face the challenges of a new day comes another gadget-app designed to encourage, coax, pry, nudge or jolt you into a lucid state of mind and physical prescience. The Walk-Up Alarm Clock App promises to join the array of alarm apps and traditional alarm clocks featuring loud bells, tones, whistles and often profane messages designed to awaken ultra sound sleepers for centuries. And who among the death-level slumber’s hasn’t resorted to hiding those trusty devises in the underwear drawer or tucked securely across the bedroom in an effort to bring you to your feet each morning?
After years of struggling to roll out of bed before ten each morning, even resorting to a device that literally shook his bed, Ricky Ho had an epiphany. His new app, Walk Up! Alarm Clock, aims to solve the problem of getting out of bed and on his feet by requiring him to take as many as 10 steps in order to silence the alarm. Since it detects motion in all directions, Walk Up! even knows if you’re cheating by merely shaking your phone or crashing against the wall and into a distant corner.
Currently one of the top 10 utilities downloaded in the iTunes app store, the program comes with two default alarms, either a woman or a man screaming, plus options for several other jarring sounds, including a witch laughing, police sirens and coughing. The default skin shows a meteor approaching earth, but you can shell out an extra $0.99 to watch either a stick of dynamite about to blow or a shark approaching as you pace around your bedroom waiting for the clatter to stop. “The app is designed in every possible way to get you out of bed,” says Ho. While Ricky’s application is only available for iPhone at this time, Android users might want to try a similar app called Walk Me Up! Alarm Clock recently released by Bazzinga Labs.
Several other really effective alarm clock applications abound, like Freaky Alarm, which awakens your brain by forcing you to get out of bed to solve a series of games in order to silence the alarm. Alarm Clock Xtreme, alarm clock and timer app, includes customizable features that prevent excessive snoozing to get you up and out of bed. I Can’t Wake Up!, is a pretty catchy name for an alarm clock application that is designed for the true Olympian champions of oversleeping or the sleepers who see no challenge in a simple math problem or a sequence repeat. This alarm clock app comes with eight different wake-up games, like a memory game, a rewrite challenge, a pairs matching game and so on. You can also choose to scan a barcode with your phone or shake it until you fill up a green circle in order to stop the alarm.
Unless you have a Marine drill Sargent or a resident bugler as a roomy, these creative and effective applications may just be the answer to you getting it going in the morning and are a great example of how advances in technology often spawns an alternative solutions to the time tested alarm clock.