Awaken – Wake up with your Mac

Awaken is a simple and easy to use alarm clock and egg timer for OSX, it integrates into your iTunes library allowing you to wake-up to your favorite music, all in a beautiful, well-designed interface. Awaken’s easy to use interface and extra features make it easy to use and allow you to customize your alarms to how you want them.

This inexpensive application is  a simple alarm clock for your Mac that seamlessly integrates with Apple’s iTunes and you can use any of your iTunes media as an alarm to help you get up in the morning.

But it doesn’t stop there, Awaken also has some very cool features built-in too, like being able to launch any application or file upon hearing the alarm, being able to use your Apple IR Remote to control the alarm, and being able to use Awaken’s full screen mode.

Full screen mode displays the time, beautiful album artwork, information about the song playing and any notes or extra information you added about the alarm all on a dark black background. One of my favorite features is that Awaken increases the volume of the music gradually, so it starts off quiet and gradually gets louder.

Awaken also works with iTunes libraries that are stored on external hard drives, and if you ever forget to plug-in your drive, or for some reason your iTunes media can’t be played – Awaken can even play a backup sound, just to make sure you get-up in time. And with Awaken, you can use all of your iTunes media, not just your music, and it even plays FairPlay DRM protected content!

Awaken also includes a built-in Egg Timer and Sleep Timer, both work similarly to the Alarm function – and it’s handy having all three to use. Adding an alarm or timer is a snap, and you can have as many alarms or timers as you want.

But one of the most useful features of Awaken is that it can wake any Mac from sleep to display an alarm or timer meaning you’ll never miss an alarm if your Mac decides to dose off for a while. It also means you can put your Mac into sleep mode and have it as your alarm in the morning without using up much of it’s battery life.

With all these features and the beautiful interface that accompanies it, Awaken is still inexpensive at just $15 (About £8) and a Family Pack is just $40 (About £21) for up to 5 Mac’s and can be purchased from the Embraceware Store. Awaken 4 works with all Intel and PowerPC based Macs running Mac OSX Leopard or Tiger, an earlier version is also available for Panther users.