What’s worse than an alarm going off in the morning to wake you up from your comfortable bed? How about being late to work or school because you made it too easy to snooze your wake-up alarm?
With a jailbreak tweak called ArithmeticAlarm9, you can force yourself to have to solve a math problem before you’re able to silence your iPhone’s alarm.
Wake up on the right side of the bed
The concept behind solving a math problem to snooze your alarm certainly isn’t new, but the idea continues circulating with each new jailbreak that comes up for newer versions of iOS.
Essentially, this tweak is going to show an alert with a text box whenever you try to tap on the “tap to snooze” button from the Lock screen as an alarm is sounding, as shown above. You’ll have to read the math problem, make sense of it, solve it, and then input your answer before the alarm is going to mute itself.
From personal experience, I think tweaks like this are great because when many people first hear their alarm in the morning, the first thing their brain makes them want to do is hit the snooze button to get a few extra minutes of shut-eye.
Of course, those few minutes can make or break your timeliness. For some, it can be really easy to take this kind of flexibility too far; that’s why having to solve a problem to help get your brain moving ahead of time can help you to have better judgement.
To set the tweak up after installation, just visit your Settings app and find its preferences pane:
Here, you can toggle the tweak on or off and configure what type of operation (+, -, x, ÷) you want, as well as how hard the math problems will be.
Personally, I think setting the operation to Random is the best choice, because that way you won’t know what’s coming and you’ll actually have to think to snooze your alarm.
As far as difficulty goes, I don’t recommend cranking up the difficulty. When you first wake up, your brain isn’t going to be ready to start solving rocket science problems. Imagine getting a problem that ends up taking too long to solve; your alarm is going to annoy everyone in your living space, as well as yourself.
On the other hand, setting a randomized easy problem is just challenging enough that you’ll have to begin thinking to snooze your alarm without having to break out the big fancy calculator to shut your alarm up.
Once you get it all set, give it a shot the next time you have to wake up. I have a pretty good feeling you’re going to feel pretty well woken up after having to solve math to shut your alarm off.
If you’re interested in giving ArithmeticAlarm9 a whirl on your jailbroken device, you can head over to Cydia’s BigBoss repository right now and download it for $0.99.
Did having to solve an alarm help you wake up better? Share below!