Many of us have to wake up far earlier than we would like, and Embraceware’s Awaken lets us do it in style. The interface is very polished, with interface transparency and iTunes-like buttons. The dock icon is a very cute aqua-ised alarm clock complete with bells on top. A large digital display (with the date underneath) reminds you of the time in a not-so-subtle way. A drawer below shows all the alarms you have set up at a glance. Of course, the main feature is that you can choose an alarm from your itunes music.

A Plethora of Options

With Awaken your experience can be customized endlessly. If you like your sleep and want to drift gradually into reality, set the awaken to fade in system volume gradually with the screen brightness after waking from sleep, playing a calming playlist in iTunes. If nothing short of bedlam in your bedroom will wake you up, set the system volume and iTunes volume to the max in preferences; then place your (laptop) Mac on the other side of the room and use your Apple remote to control it. If for some reason iTunes crashes or the music is unavailable, a selection of several short, but still jarring sounds get you out of bed-choose from ‘cuckoo clock’, ’sci-fi alarm’, or ‘buzzer (loud)’ among others.

Power Features

If you are too lazy (or busy) to open your RSS reader, email, or browser when you wake up, Awaken will do it for you. If you’re working on an important article or other file, these can be opened too. You can set a handy reminder note to show when the alarm starts (e.g. sync iPod, make hazelnut-with-an-extra-shot-cappuccino). If you find that music isn’t really right for you, add any custom sounds you like through a preference pane or choose from your podcasts instead. For a hidden-away look, Awaken can open at login as a menubar app, and alarms can trigger through this.

While I actually got my copy of Awaken as part of the MacHeist 2 bundle, the asking price of $12.95 isn’t bad, and you can take advantage of a fully-functional 2 week trial if you don’t feel like shelling out that much for an alarm clock.