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  #1  
Old 10-18-2008, 07:13 AM
Jason Dunn
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Default Birthday Reminders Triggering at Midnight: Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

It's a couple of minutes after midnight, and I'm trying to finish an article before hitting the pillow - and what should chime loudly beside me? My Windows Mobile smartphone, helpfully telling me that it's someone's birthday tomorrow. Birthday reminders are great - I'd miss almost every birthday without them. But why, please someone tell me why, would someone at Microsoft have thought that birthday reminders should trigger at midnight? Is there some maniacal Windows Mobile program manager who calls people one minute after midnight to wish them a happy birthday? I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want their phone chiming at midnight to remind them of a birthday. 10 AM on the day of the person's birthday? Sure, why not. Midnight? Insanity.

There's been more than one occasion when I've forgotten to put my phone in silent mode and I've left it downstairs in the kitchen, only to be woken up by the reminder chiming about someone's birthday. The problem is that birthdays are automatically created as all day events, starting at 12 AM on the day of the person's birthday and ending at 12 AM on the day after their birthday. Short of going through and editing every birthday reminder I have in my calendar, is there a solution for this ridiculousness? And why, with the latest Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system on my phone, hasn't this been fixed? Every version of Windows Mobile Microsoft adds some swanky new Exchange feature, yet these irritating little bugs don't get fixed. It's enough to make a guy stay up late on a Friday night ranting about it...

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  #2  
Old 10-18-2008, 08:24 AM
OTHHC
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Jason - interesting perspective and clearly an indication that your Friday nights aren't very exciting .

This has been an issue for me ever since I used a Sharp Zaurus ZR5800 as my primary device (I suspect many of your readers have no idea what I am talking about - but I know you do). The Zaurus was probably the best integration between applications that I have ever seen. If I recall correctly, when you entered a contacts birthdate in the contact application, you had the opyion of being reminded several days (user configurable) before the actual birthday.

The great thing with the way that this was implemented was that the reminders would appear when the device was started up and you could snooze or dismiss the item depending on whether or nor you had taken the appropriate action.

I can't tell you the number of times this saved me or made me look good. I have yet to find a device that provides as useful of reminders as the Zaurus did and I bought it around 1996! I still have it so I will have tofire it up soon to remind myself of the good old days .
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  #3  
Old 10-18-2008, 10:58 AM
starstreak
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Hard part is as default, what would you have it remind you of a birthday on that day? Unless it goes into having its own preference screen, 12am is prolly the best time. But a few things I hate:

1) The chime, continues way past the initial reminder. So if yu don't turn it off, it'll beep all night long.

2) Whos bright idea was to have the unit turn on when something alerts us? Can't tell you how many times I took out my Tilt only to see I changed the date...

3) The (*&# date and time screen can be changed if you click on any clock on the Today screen! WTF! That shouldn't be done. MAKE me goto a menu for time to change. Not if I touch the clock on the Today screen. This is a TOUCH screen device! I will touch that clock by accident. And I don't know how many of you there are, but when I set my clock, its normally doesn't NEED changing that often.

Back to #2 sorry. Don't have a touch screen turn ON when off. Let it make NOISE. Let it shine those little indicator lights. DON'T turn on a touch screen when not in use! *sigh* Ok, ok. Hows about turning on the screen for like 15 seconds BUT disable the screen so if anything touches it, nothing will get changed or deleted. I can remember times, besides the time, that my calender was activated and things got messed up because I had the device in my pocket.

4) Allow us to use the vibrate mode for anything that could be used as an alarm. Works wonders.
 
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  #4  
Old 10-18-2008, 11:38 AM
Dyvim
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Quote:
Originally Posted by starstreak View Post
Hard part is as default, what would you have it remind you of a birthday on that day? Unless it goes into having its own preference screen, 12am is prolly the best time.
I disagree- I don't want to be reminded at 12am of any of my "all-day" events, and I suspect few others do as well. By default it should remind at your configured start of day time (e.g. 8am) that day or else maybe at end of day (e.g. 5pm) the day before (so you can prepare). Then if you're some crazy freak who really does want your device beeping at midnight you could always go in and configure a specific reminder time.

This is a problem with desktop Outlook as well. Another huge gripe I have with desktop Outlook is how it handles all day events when you change time zones. If I go from say east coast to west coast and set the new time zone on my laptop (so that the clock displays the correct time), all my all day events go to being from 9pm on the previous day to 9 pm of the desired day. How hard would it be to always make all day events go from midnight to midnight? Microsoft actually provides a tool to go through and "fix" these events if you move between time zones, but this doesn't help a traveler who is only temporarily in another time zone. And this is supposed to be one of Microsoft's greatest business apps? (I don't remember if Pocket PC devices handle all day events and time zone changes properly- I know the iPhone does.)
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  #5  
Old 10-18-2008, 12:02 PM
hiatus
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I have been using my Dell Axim X50v on WM 2003SE for a few years already, I had similar problem with Outlook. When I input birthday in contact, it will create a birthday reminder as an appointment in my Pocket Informant; I always know it will remind me at midnight, so what I do is to search for "birthday" in Pocket Informant, click into each "birthday reminder" manually and turn them off one by one.

This is not bullet proof though; once that person's birthday is passed, it will reset the alarm reminder for next year, so I ended up doing it again and again once in a while when I am bored.

Well, don't know if it's the same in WM 6, hope this help though

Good luck.
 
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  #6  
Old 10-18-2008, 03:44 PM
Dave Beauvais
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I'm usually up at midnight, so I am annoyed by this for a different reason: It really highlights the absurdity of the Windows Mobile reminder snooze options.
  • 5 minutes before
  • 5 minutes
  • 10 minutes
  • 15 minutes
  • 30 minutes
  • 1 hour
  • 1 day
That's it. Why no "4 hours," "8 hours" "half day," etc.? It just jumps from 1 hour to an entire day. Why isn't there an option to specify a snooze time? It's been a while, but I could swear that was available in some previous Pocket PC version.

As it is, a midnight reminder goes off and my only real option is to dismiss it -- thus forgetting about it by the time I wake up in the morning -- so as not to be annoyed throughout the night.
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  #7  
Old 10-18-2008, 04:09 PM
Jason Dunn
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Quote:
Originally Posted by starstreak View Post
Hard part is as default, what would you have it remind you of a birthday on that day? Unless it goes into having its own preference screen, 12am is prolly the best time.
Well let's see here...the point of a reminder is to tell you to do something. How many people are going to wish someone a birthday at midnight? So, even if you were awake at midnight, what would you do? Maybe send an email...but it's not like you can go shopping for a gift or call the person. Having a default is important, but why not have a default that makes more sense? 8 AM? 10 AM? I think anything would be better than midnight.
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  #8  
Old 10-18-2008, 04:57 PM
dma1965
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Default Ridiculous Annoyances Which Go On Forever...

Here is a partial list of annoyances which have been part of the Pocket PC experience since at least 2000:

1. The afformentioned midnight Birthday/All Day Event Bug

2. The afformentioned inability to snooze something in a custom manner.

3. The inability to set a custom reminder sound for a task or appointment (one global sound is your choice).

4. The inability to view tasks and appointments in one interface (I find this utterly ridiculous).

5. The ridiculous limitations of the file open and file save dialog (no ability to access file system globally)

6. The afformentioned utter stupidity of the clock dialog opening when I touch the clock.

7. The annoying proplem of the device waking up on a touchscreen device when a reminder goes off. This would not be so annoying if I could turn this off and/or at least have the device disable or lock the touchscreen when this happens so a device in my pocket does not stay on forever and end up with God knows what applications open when I pull it out of my pocket. Dear God! They fixed this issue so it would not wake up when a push email comes in over Exchange, so I know it can be done. Why did they stop there???

There are third party applications available to resolve some of these issues, but I must then live with the constant reminder that some of my precious and still limited memory is taken up by the less-than-stellar Windows application that the more suitable application replaces. Why,oh,why can't I have the option of uninstalling the craptacular Windows application if I find something else that suits me better? I usually run a custom ROM on my Tilt, and some do not include office as part of the ROM, but include it as a cab, which installs and runs just fine. If I should choose to switch to the Softmaker suite of office applications instead, I can uninstall MS Office and reclaim about 6 megs of RAM. My preferred music player is Pocket Player, and my preffered video player is TCPMP. Why can't I uninstall Windows Media Player?

It just seems to me that the development team has deluded themselves into thinking that because we have dealt with the limitations for so long that we simply are no longer annoyed by the limitations, or that they somehow know whats best for us, or that they simply do not care to be bothered to address these issues. This usually comes about as a result of a miguided QA effort.

Microsoft still hangs onto the "arrogant uber developer" mentality despite constant reminders from its users, and the rest of the world, that it no longer sets the tone for the world of computing. It is like a mob boss who wakes up one day to realize that his family no longer controls the city, and eventually must get whacked because he refuses to play nicely with the other "Dons".
 
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  #9  
Old 10-18-2008, 05:19 PM
Rocco Augusto
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dyvim View Post
I disagree- I don't want to be reminded at 12am of any of my "all-day" events, and I suspect few others do as well...
Normally I would totally agree, actually 99.999999% of the time I would agree, but during my last anniversary I completely forgot about it and got the standard 11:45PM reminder that if I didn't get a gift soon I would be sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future. Needless to say, after a quick run online and I was able to have some flowers delivered at 8:30am right before she left for work.

This is the only time I haven't been annoyed about the midnight reminders for all day events
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  #10  
Old 10-18-2008, 05:41 PM
starstreak
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My post about saying it was "ok" for the 12am, but that unless they redid a whole preference screen for options on when to remind you, 12am would be best. If it reminded me at 8am, I would be on my way to work. I would've forgot the present that I was supposed to bring. 4am, would be as dumb as 12, but at least 12am would display a reminder and have my butt covered in saying "at least I told you" from the pda. If you could mute the ring at 12am and if it didnt continue to beep and the screen didn't turn on, then I'm all for the 12am. Did that make sense? Sorry, just got up.
 
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