Being woken from a deep sleep by an intrusive sound is never fun, so it's easy to grow resentful of your alarm app. It's a necessary evil, right? AlarmPad is a new beta alarm app that tries to add some context to your alarms to make itself useful beyond just waking you up from a restful sleep. You may not love it, but you might respect it.

It only takes a few taps to set an alarm in AlarmPad, and it ties into your calendar appointments and the weather forecast automatically. You can see the relevant information for each of your active alarms in the app, or on one of the stylish widgets. Dismissing an alarm also pulls up a notification view with all your calendar events and weather data. Dismissing the alarm can actually be done with the screen, of course, but it supports voice commands too. 

AlarmPad can talk back by playing a pre-recorded message after you dismiss an alarm. That expands the potential usefulness beyond just waking up in the morning. You can essentially use the app to send voice messages to yourself in the future. The free version of AlarmPad has some ads and limits you to 5 active alarms, but the pro version is only a buck.