Alarm Clock: Free, full-featured alarm clock for Mac OS X

Downloaded 5/24/06. Like the man said, this is a free, full-featured alarm clock app! You can set it to wake your Mac to any song from iTunes, or to any kind of alarm you can record. (It comes with a whole folder full of ideas.) You can also use it as a timer, for either repeating or one time uses. What’s not to like? Well, I’ve gotta give it a go before I can say yay or nay.

Update 7/8/06 Well, I have to say this is the best little clock app I’ve used so far! Not only does it run from the menubar (which I like), but it also has all the functions I’ll ever need! The menubar clock I’d used before was TinyAlarm, but it doesn’t do stopwatch or timer actions (or, if it does, it’s not at all obvious how to do them). Minuteur is beautiful, but its interface is obscure, and it seems to work best as a stopwatch rather than as a timer. AlarmClock, on the other hand, clearly shows its functions and offers to let you pick which one you want: New Alarm, New Timer, or New Stopwatch.

The Alarm function is new to me, and probably not that useful at the moment since I don’t sleep in the same room with my Mac. (Poor me!) But I’m sure if I ever need it, the options Alarm Clock provides are more than sufficient. The Timer and Stopwatch functions are both terrific, though. They open tiny floating windows (they look like widgets, actually) with big numbers that easily let you manage the timing or stopwatching.

Besides being free, you can also download a whole raft of alarm sounds that can be used. And speaking of alarms, one of the key functions of Alarm Clock is the ability to choose any song from your iTunes library as the alarm sound. Alarm Clock can even display info about the song in its window when the alarm goes off. What a great little freebie!