Winter Wake-Up
One of the bitter realities that makes winter so annoying to deal with is a car and driveway covered in snow when you wake up in the morning. But what if you could use an app to wake you up early with enough time to spare to clear out the snow?
Winter Wake-Up
- Free
- Available at: Apple App Store, Android Market
Winter Wake-Up is the creation of an advertising firm in Belgium called Boondoggle after snow repeatedly delayed many of its employees from getting to work on time. The solution, they surmised, was to create an app that could monitor the weather and adjust an alarm to wake up a person earlier if an overnight snowfall requires extra time to clear the snow.
The app basically functions like native alarm apps for both the iPhone and Android, except that you need to also tell it how much of a grace period it needs to give you if there's frost or snow. The third option, which is in the event of a massive snowfall deemed too much to go to work, should always be checked off because it's generally useless. To do all this, the app needs to go by your location and send you messages to wake you up on a full Wi-Fi or 3G connection.
The Frost option is really more for bitterly cold days that might require a little extra time to heat up the car, but the app is a bit hit or miss on how it interprets temperatures. For one, it doesn't account for wind chill, which can plunge the mercury outside considerably. And for another, it can assume there is frost when there actually isn't, otherwise taking you away from 10 valuable minutes of snoozing.
At first, you need to be sure that the alarm is even activated. The instructions state that a "1" has to be seen on the app's icon in order for it to be working. After three tries, I finally managed to get it going, though there is no real explanation as to why the first two attempts failed.
That said, when the alarm went off in the morning, it went off at the specified time because there was no snowfall and no frost to scrape away outside. Condo owners who park underground won't have any need for the frost option, while the snow one will come in handy for those commuting by car. What it considers a heavy snowfall is hard to measure because the app doesn't articulate it anywhere, but needless to say, if it snowed a fair bit overnight, you will hear the alarm tone at the earlier designated time.
As a free app, Winter Wake-Up is a novel idea and perfect for the harsh Canadian winter, though some tweaks are needed to make it a little more reliable.