StationAlarm (iTunes Link) is an intelligent alarm system that is designed to let you sleep in the MRT without fearing to wake up at the right stations.
All you have to do is to set your current station and the destination station. Your route is automatically computed and StationAlarm rings an alarm to wake
up at the right station(s).
Right station(s) means, if there is a interchange, where you have to
change trains, StationAlarm can automatically wake you up at the right time for alighting. (Right time is 1 min before the actual time)
For example, when you travel daily from Woodlands to Pioneer, StationAlarm will automatically wake you up at Jurong East and then at Pioneer. It’s especially helpful when you travel across the length of breadth of the island.
Settings
The app also supports a variety of customizations like, consider interchange waiting times while calculating estimated time, whether the app should vibrate the phone or beep the iPod Touch during Alarm etc., It also supports localization of the MRT Station names in Mandarin and Tamil. By default, the app picks up the default language from the device. If you have set a locale that’s not supported, it defaults to Singapore English. The following locales are supported by the app.
Singapore-English (en_SG)
Singapore-Chinese(zh_SG)
Malaysia-Malay (my_MS)
India-Tamil (ta_IN)
Screenshots
What’s more?
StationAlarm can be customized to store your home and office locations in the settings tab. These values can be picked quickly from the Station Picker view.
How it works?
StationAlarm uses Dijkstra’s routing algorithm to find the shortest path between your start and end destination. It then computes the time taken to reach that station based on the average estimated time and uses GPS to fine tune the algorithm. This would be especially useful for iPod Touch owners as the location services may not be very accurate.
Known Issues/Disclaimers
Tamil characters does not appear in the right order prior to iPhone OS 4. Apple has fixed this in iPhone OS 4 and hence when you update your device in early June, it should automatically get fixed.
Push Notifications don’t work if you are not connected to a WIFI/3G network. So on an iPod Touch, you should not quit the app or lock the iPod Touch when StationAlarm is running. The other work around is to play your iPod in background and start StationAlarm. This is a known issue with the iPhone OS software and unfortunately nothing can be done.
What’s new in version 2.0?
StationAlarm 2.0 includes support for the newly added stations for the Circle Line MRT. You can also choose your home and office locations from the station chooser screens. The most important addition is Push Notifications. When you close StationAlarm on your iPhone, you will continue to get notifications and the badge on the icon reduces. When it reaches 0, you will be alerted. This means, you can check your arrival time from the icon without even opening the app.
A Word on Push Notifications
Push Notifications are available only as a in-app purchase. However existing users of StationAlarm can activate the in-app purchase for free. If you already purchased the previous version of StationAlarm, open the “Buy Push Notifications Page” and tap, “Enable Push During Peak Hours” button. You should see, “You have been migrated to StationAlarm 2 for free” instead of the traditional in-app purchase screen.
What is there in StationAlarm SG going forward?
The author is a native speaker of Tamil. As such, he cannot translate the user interface in the other two languages (Mandarin/Malay). As of now, only station names and push notifications are localized in all four languages. With proper support from someone, he would like to translate it to Mandarin and Malay.
Anything else by popular demand.
Support
For product support, contact the author @ s.stationalarm@mk.sg
