Hacker News Reader

Comment by byoung2 | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to cancel it without being at the location? My wife is a nurse, and sometimes she is on call. She gets a call by 4am telling her if she has to come in or not. If she used this, and set an alarm for 7am at the hospital, and then gets a call that says she's canceled, does she still have to drive to work to turn off her alarm?

View on HN

If there was a way to cancel it without being at the location, that would destroy the use case. The app is targeted at people who know they don't have any willpower and therefore it ought to be strict.

Sorry for your wife, but I think building this feature would be a mistake.

(For the record - apologies to people with no willpower - you could presumably cancel it by revoking the app's Twitter access)

I disagree. Sometimes you can't do things due to circumstances, not willpower. This is what is keeping me from downloading the app. Nice concept though.

Thanks for the feedback, an interesting point. I think we may change it to allow you deactivate up until say an hour before, and maybe a life system that gives you a "get of jail free card".

But you can't be given too many options as morning-brain will do anything to stay in bed.

Well in my wife's case, where work is a 30 minute drive away, there is no chance she will drive to work to shut off an alarm. Maybe a good override would be to select an alternate location close by that will let you shut off the alarm (e.g. her gym or Starbucks). That way if she's not working, she will at least do something productive instead.

Ahh multiple locations. That is a good idea.

I would personally choose not to over complicate things and simply make this the app "for when you absolutely, positively, have to be there." If there's a possibility of cancellation, well—you're looking for another app, then. I realize this will decrease the number of times the app is used, but I'd say complicating it would be worse.

I know what you mean. Biggest difficulty was trying and make it clear to the user how the app works. The more features you add, the harder that can get.

That sounds like a great option for in app purchases.

Tweeting a photo may be a bigger motivator than just text (guessing this is not a current feature based on the screenshot provided in app store.)

Photos would definitely be cool, make it seem a bit more fun - plus writing is a lot of effort.

Would have to be careful about becoming the "Naked photo tweeter app" though.

Yeah, I feel like there are quite a few scenarios where there needs to be a user recovery system, such as yours, or a person being sick, etc. Although I can't really think of anything you could possibly design it with so that it would allow that, while keeping the structure of the location design. If you make it a complicated process to deactivate the alarm, then it just goes back to being an alarm with a complicated process to turn off...

If you put your phone in airplane mode before the time the alarm goes off, it presumably won't be able to go off. I don't know if our will still go off later. At worst, I guess you could uninstall it (and possibly reinstall later).

The server sends the tweet so you could turn the phone off and it would still get sent out.

At the moment, a viable cheat is faking location on your mobile device.

Or de-auth the app on Twitter.

This is the way out at the moment.

What we thought of doing was your submit someone you wouldn't want to tweet and then have an account (the punisher account) tweet them the message saying it was written by you.

When we were at university we had it running on the machines there and it would just wipe your home directory or email your professor - harsh times but good times.

Your wife goes to work helping to save lives all day. I don't think she needs a device that will tweet "fart lmao i'm so random p.s. fuk u j-teen beeber" if she's 2 minutes late due to traffic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com