Motion Alarm
by Eric March on October 6, 2008 at 7:54 pm
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(3 votes, average: 2.33 out of 5)
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App Name: Motion Alarm
Developer: Maplewoods Associates Ltd.
Category: Utilities
You paid good money for your iPhone (or 2G iPod Touch) so you want to protect your investment, right? Maplewoods Associates wants to help you do that with what’s supposed to be another novel use of the accelerometer: A motion alarm. The idea here is that you’re supposed to load Motion Alarm, then put your iPhone in sleep mode. Motion Alarm is supposed to keep working even while asleep, so sayeth Maplewoods Associates Ltd. Then, when someone picks up your device, it detects the motion and sets off an alarm of your choice — a siren, explosion, drum & bass beat, police dogs, or warning sound.
Sounds pretty handy on paper, right? Unfortunately, that’s the problem with paper: It’s next to worthless. It doesn’t work in sleep mode. If you smack the sleep button, Motion Alarm does what any good security guard does: Props its feet up on the desk, leans back in its well-worn swivel chair, and drifts off. Quietly. “Alright,” I thought, “perhaps if I let it go to sleep naturally instead of hitting the sleep button.” A perfectly reasonable supposition, yes? No, and shame on you for not realizing I was setting you up for a contradiction. Motion Alarm disables auto-lock when it’s open (or more likely, keeps resetting the idle timer), so it never actually goes to sleep.
Although it’s rather pointless to bring this up now, Maplewoods also claim you can adjust the motion sensitivity, but there is absolutely no option to do so. (I’m guessing this is a feature of the currently-pending-approval version 0.95) Furthermore, there are only one or two sounds that are actually loud enough, with the volume turned up to maximum, to be anything even remotely approaching an effective alarm.
So, there’s your motion alarm: Keep the app open and your battery draining (or preferably plugged in), and presuming the would-be thief doesn’t notice the screen with the bouncing motion meter and “Motion Alarm” emblazoned along the top, you’ve got an anti-theft device.
Look, I really like this idea, and if it can actually work it might actually be useful. This version 0.90 however doesn’t work at all. If 0.95 comes out and it actually works as advertised I will write an update article. I’ll even be nice and not give this the EPIC FAIL tag until I see how 0.95 works. For now though, this version gets one star.
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Posted in Utilities
Hi and thanks for the review.
Just to clarify a few points:
a) If the Motion Alarm app is left on, it actually blocks the iphone’s automated sleep mode. This is quite a fancy feature that 99% of apps out there do not have. This enables the app to remain functional forever (until of course the phones battery dies :)) Unfortunately, no apps are currently functional once sleep mode has been activately due to restirctions with the iPhone SDK. This is something we are hoping Apple will relax in the future.
b) In 0.9, all settings including motion sensitivity and alarm activation delay features are available from the global iphone settings page. Simply click the Settings icon from your iphone desktop and scroll down to the bottom of the page. In 0.95 we are integrating settings into the app itself to avoid confusion.
We are also planning GPS and SMS integration so that you can be informed of your phone location if it does really get stolen. Again, although this is not possible until Apple integrates push capabilities into their SDK.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for your support.
Any comments or suggestions are welcome here:
http://groups.google.com/group/crowdedroadiphone
Cheers,
Adrian
iPhone Team Manager
Crowded Road
A Maplewoods Company
http://www.crowdedroad.com
Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately, there are two things Apple hold sacred when it comes to the iPhone: Performance and battery life. Backgrounding is disallowed to prevent degradation of the former, and apps being put to sleep when the phone is sent into sleep mode degrades the latter, so, likely no love there, either.
I am still confused as to the claim in the App Store description that it works in sleep mode though, because clearly it doesn’t, and in fact requires that you keep the device on at all times. Would it at least be possible to add a kind of “lock mode” that turns off the screen and/or backlight? Seems like the most sensible, battery-friendly thing to do.
As for the settings — ah yes, thanks for clarifying that. I’m always forgetting Firmware 2.0 allowed spinning of an app’s settings into the iPhone’s settings applet. Having to drop out of an app and go into the settings has always struck me as a needless set of extra hoops to jump through; I’m in the app, just let me adjust my #^$%* settings there! I’m glad you’re bringing them on-board for the next version.
Fortunately, GPS/SMS notifications will be possible once Apple finally gets that damned push notification service online. I can’t believe it’s taking them this long…
You have raised some valid points. Let me respond to the best of my ability.
a) Battery life - obviously we would prefer to let the sleep mode take hold and have the app work in the background. Unfortunately, this aint possible with current SDK. Your suggestion of a “”lock mode” that turns off the screen and/or backlight” seems like a good idea and we will research that possibility.
b) App store claim - we dont claim that it works in sleep mode. We claim it works “despite” it. Perhaps our language should have been more clear, but the app is designed to block sleep mode, not to work during sleep mode.
Thanks again for your support and valuable feedback.
Cheers,
Adrian
Ah — yes, the wording is rather ambiguous there; one could certainly interpret that to mean that it works in sleep mode — as in, “it works despite the iPhone being asleep,” rather than “it works despite the iPhone’s attempts to go to sleep by disabling sleep mode while the application is active.”
As for the “lock mode” type thing — I don’t know if it’s possible with the SDK, whether they let you monkey with the backlight and/or screen activity, but hopefully they do, as this would allow you to simulate a sleep mode that only uses a little bit more battery power than the real thing. Would-be thieves wouldn’t suspect anything and the app could function as it is designed to do.
Hey Eric,
Version 0.95 has launched. Please check it out. We think its really nice and things have improved quite a bit.
Cheers,
Adrian
Thanks for the tip, Adrian. I will check it out.