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. Once set, whenever you open the application, StationAlarm will automatically start with “Home” -> “Office” in the morning and “Office” -> “Home” in the evening. With the help of another setting, “Auto Start Timer”, Once you customize the application, all you have to do is to start the app once you enter the MRT, and start sleeping. No button presses needed!
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 as of now as iPhone OS 3.1.2 has not yet implemented Apple Advanced Typography. Probably, iPhone OS 4.0 should fix the issue.

Locking the iPhone when StationAlarm is running will stop it from working. For StationAlarm to alert you, please do not lock your iPhone. The other work around is to play your iPod in background and start StationAlarm. In this case, StationAlarm will still run when the iPhone is locked. This is a known issue with the iPhone OS software and unfortunately nothing can be done.

What’s new in version 1.5?

StationAlarm 1.5 includes support for the newly built Circle Line MRT. It also features minor usability enhancements like, remembering the route and restoring it when you close StationAlarm for a SMS/Phone call. Performance improvements like improved start up times. When StationAlarm is opened, it starts with the previously chosen route. You can choose to revert it to your default home <-> office route by pressing the “Defaults” button. Similarly, it’s now easier to swap the source and destination stations by tapping just one button. You can also set your home and office locations from the station chooser screens.

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 are localized in all four languages. With proper support from someone, he would like to translate it to Mandarin and Malay.

PUSH notifications for waking you up as an in-app purchase (0.99$) with the app price going down to 0.99$. This in-app purchase will be free for existing customers who purchased the app for 1.99$. To enable this migration, StationAlarm 1.5 will ping back your UDID to my servers.

Anything else by popular demand.

Support

For product support, contact the author @ s.stationalarm@mk.sg