From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2004-04-19T11:30:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Thinking about a date-matching algorithm...

Hal:

I am now only 1,700 messages behind on ruby-talk, but I thought that I would 
respond to this -- and tell you what the PalmOS platform does for alarms.

Basically, any application is allowed to set a single alarm at a time. The 
OS wakes up periodically (~1 minute) to service the alarms; when it detects 
that an alarm is due, it hands it over to the application to handle through 
its notification manager. The application, after handling the alarm's 
notification, is responsible for setting the *next* alarm for the 
application.

>From the perspective of Tycho, I would recommend that you make each alert 
responsible for setting its next alert in a master alert list. It might look 
like this in the definition of the alert:

  Name: New Year's Day
  StartDate: 2001.01.01
  Recurs: [object representing this date every year]
  NextDate: 2005.01.01

In your alarm file, you might have:

  Today: 2004.04.18
  2004.05.12: [Mother's Day (US), ...]
  2004.05.24: [Memorial Day (US), ...]
  ...
  2005.01.01: [New Year's Day]

You would remove the appropriate date's alarm listing, but call 
#next_alert_date on each object in the day's list.

This is provided without having read the rest of the thread you had here :)

-austin
--
austin ziegler    * austin@halostatue.ca * Toronto, ON, Canada
software designer * pragmatic programmer * 2004.04.18
                                         * 22:17:08