An alarm that keeps ringing until you answer it.
Clock-time alarms in your menu bar, with recurrence, a label and a sound — and three intensities, up to one that takes over the screen until you press OK. It rings with the popover closed and after a restart, it can warn you minutes ahead, and if it went off while you were away, it tells you.
The time is the only thing you have to fill in.
Everything else — the label, the sound, the recurrence, a heads-up, a specific date — is optional, and the form never disables the save button because you touched an optional field. Repeat once, daily, or weekly on the days you pick; new alarms default to once, because a repeating alarm nobody asked for goes off every morning forever.
Thursday you can already set Friday’s alarms: the date is a separate optional field, and it applies to one-off alarms — a recurring alarm already decides its own days, so asking for both is refused with a reason instead of a silent surprise. There is also a “test the alert” button, so you can see exactly what it will look like without waiting for the hour.
- Six sounds, mapped to each platform’s own
- An optional label, so 07:30 is not just “07:30”
- Relative shortcut up to 23h59m; past that, use the date
- History in its own sub-tab, with the day each one rang
- Lives in the Focus tab, next to Pomodoro and Countdown
“Standup in five” and “leave or miss the flight” are not the same alarm.
So the intensity belongs to the alarm, not to a global preference — with one setting for everything, it is always wrong for one of the two. Soft shows a banner and waits for your click. Loud waits too, and loops the sound while it does. Blocking puts a card in the middle of the screen that you have to dismiss, with the sound looping for up to five minutes.
New alarms are loud by default. The reason is unglamorous: an alarm that plays one chime and goes quiet is one you sleep through, and the level nobody picks by hand is exactly the one that ends up on alarms dictated to an AI agent. What the three levels change is the sound — none of them make the alert vanish on its own.
- The alert waits for you; auto-dismiss ships turned off
- “I’m on it” asks again in 10 minutes, at the same level or lower
- A follow-up never escalates to blocking — you would learn to lie to it
- Presentation mode serves a blocking alarm as loud, and the editor says so
The popover is closed. It rings anyway.
The scheduling does not live in the widget. Each alarm is handed to the app’s native layer as an absolute timestamp, and the code that keeps that in sync loads with the app rather than waiting for you to open the panel — so an alarm set today rings tomorrow even if you never open the widget in between, and it survives quitting and reopening Toolbox.
The same schedule carries the heads-up: one soft warning, 5 to 30 minutes ahead by preset or anything up to 12 hours, that never loops and never consumes a one-off alarm. If the head start has already passed by the time you save, it does not fire and the form tells you — a warning that arrives after the thing it was warning about is just noise.
- Rings with the popover closed and the tab never opened
- Survives restarting the app
- Muting the OS notification does not mute the alarm
- The heads-up uses the app’s own banner, anchored to the tray icon
An alarm that rang to an empty room still has to tell you.
When one fires, the app checks how long the machine has been idle. Past a minute of silence it assumes nobody saw it: the alert becomes sticky and waits on screen, a bell shows up in the menu bar, and the widget shows an amber “it rang while you were away” notice. Three traces, because one is easy to walk past — and the popover opens on whatever tab you used last, so without the bell the trace would not even tell you where to look.
The mark lives in the history, so a restart does not erase it, and dismissing it keeps the row: you still get to see that the alarm rang, and when. The history holds the last 30, each with the day it went off — a bare “18:29” does not tell you whether that was today or the day before yesterday.
It comes with Toolbox. There is nothing to install.
Alarms is built into Webstarted Toolbox, the app that lives in your menu bar on macOS and your system tray on Windows — so it is already there the moment you install it, in the Focus tab. These are a few of its neighbors:
Questions, answered.
Does it ring with the app closed?
It rings with the popover closed, the tab never opened and the app minimized — what it needs is Toolbox running, which it is, because it lives in your menu bar. The scheduling does not happen in the widget: the alarm is handed to the app's native layer as an absolute timestamp, so nothing depends on a panel being on screen. Quitting Toolbox entirely is the one case where nothing can ring, same as any alarm app you have force-quit.
What are the three intensities for?
“Standup in five” and “leave now or miss the flight” do not deserve the same treatment, and picking one global setting means it is always wrong for one of them. So the level is per alarm: a soft one shows a banner and waits for your click; a loud one loops the sound while it waits; a blocking one puts a card in the middle of the screen that you have to dismiss, with the sound looping for up to five minutes. New alarms are loud by default — an alarm you can sleep through is not really an alarm.
Does the alert disappear on its own?
No, and that is deliberate. It waits for you to close it; auto-dismiss exists as an option and ships turned off. The earlier behaviour tied it to how idle the machine was, which measures activity, not attention — an alarm once dismissed itself because there had been typing in another window.
What happens if it rings while I am away from the desk?
It tells you, in three places, because one is easy to miss. When the alarm fires the app checks how long the machine has been idle; past a minute of silence the alert becomes sticky and waits on screen instead of going anywhere, a bell appears in the menu bar, and the widget shows an amber “it rang while you were away” notice. The mark lives in the history, so it survives a restart, and clearing it keeps the row.
Can it warn me before the alarm itself?
Yes — one heads-up, 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes ahead (or any value up to 12 hours). It uses the same native schedule as the alarm, so it also survives a restart, but it never loops the sound and it never consumes a one-off alarm: the real one still rings at its time. If the head start has already passed when you save, it simply does not fire and the form says so — a “leaving in 10 minutes” that arrives five minutes before is worse than silence.
Can I set one for a specific day, not just a time?
Yes. The time is what is required; the date is optional and applies to one-off alarms — Thursday you can leave Friday's alarms ready. Recurring alarms decide their own days, so combining the two is refused with an explanation instead of a silent surprise.
What happens to an alarm whose day already passed?
It stays in the list, silent and marked as expired. The two alternatives are worse: firing it when you next open the laptop dumps Friday's three alarms on you on Monday morning, one loud loop at a time, and deleting it quietly means nobody ever learns it existed.
Does it repeat daily or weekly?
Once, daily, or weekly on the weekdays you pick. New alarms default to once — a repeating alarm nobody asked for goes off every morning forever.
Can I stop it from taking over during a presentation?
That is automatic. With presentation mode on, an alarm set to blocking is served as loud instead, so nothing covers the screen you are sharing. The editor tells you when that is in effect, rather than letting you find out live.
Can Claude or another AI agent set alarms?
If you allow it, per widget. Toolbox ships a local MCP server, and this widget exposes actions to add, list, update and remove alarms — “set an important alarm for 15:30” lands as a loud one that loops until dismissed. Removing one asks for confirmation. The agent only writes the alarm; the firing still belongs to the app's native layer, so an alarm an agent set rings with the popover closed like any other.
Is it free?
Yes. Webstarted Toolbox is a free beta, needs no account, and Alarms comes built into the app — there is nothing to install and nothing to enable.
Get Webstarted Toolbox
Free to use. Alarms is built in — download the app and it is already in the Focus tab. macOS 12+ and Windows 10+.
One icon, many small tools
This is just one of the widgets in Webstarted Toolbox. Here are the rest: