The first days of November signal the coming of fall leaf cleanup, Thanksgiving, snow tires and inclement weather in the northern hemisphere. Daylight hours are shorter, and getting out of bed in the morning feels more like getting out of bed in the middle of the night; but small business owners know the importance of braving the elements. Come frost, snow or wintery apocalypse, someone has to open the store on time. Fortunately, more and more smartphone apps are coming to the rescue in myriad ways, most recently in the form of The Winter Wake Up by Boondoggle, which makes punctuality easier than ever to achieve.
The Winter Wake Up is designed to compensate for time lost cleaning off vehicles and driving below the speed limit. To start, the app is set in the same way as any other smartphone alarm clock. During the night the app tracks weather information around the user’s location, and sounds an alarm earlier in the morning if bad weather is likely. The app then offers three options: one that will wake you five minutes earlier, to leave time for scraping frost off the car; one that wakes you 30 minutes earlier, to leave time for digging out from beneath a blanket of snow; and one reserved for dire days when the weather is severe enough to warrant staying home, in which case the app turns the alarm off altogether, according to a screen that reads, “Don’t bother waking me up, I’ll make up the hours on Saturday.” Both effective and coy, the app has been a popular addition to the iPhone and Android families. It is available for free through iTunes and the Droid Marketplace, and proves an excellent tool for retailers who cope with regular wintry mornings.