MacAlarm-IconMacAlarm is a Free OS X Alarm Clock. It wakes you up with either telling iTunes to play a playlist or by ringing with some annoying Alarm Clock Sounds.

Download

Download MacAlarm for OS X now! After all - it's free ;). And only 0.5 MB big.




Features

  • Choose any iTunes-Playlist to wake you up at a specified time
  • If Music does not drive you out of the bed: How about some annonying Ringtones?
  • If you belong to those, who never hear a single alarm Clock: Set up as many Alarms at different times as you want
  • Put iTunes or your whole Mac to sleep in a specified time
  • Automatic Updates (if you want)
  • Integrated Crash Reporting (if you want)
  • Kinda ars-gratia-aris Integration into Growl (if you want)
  • Language-Support for English and German

Screenshots

Why another Alarm Clock Software?

There are two reasons behind this Application:
a) One morning, my Alarm Clock decided to not work anymore, so I got up late and got a rant from my boss. The same on the two following days, until I saw that the problem was not me not waking up, but the ***** Alarm Clock. All other Alarm Applications I could find for OS X were ugly, quite expensive and/or just not the thing I was looking for.
b) Since over a year, I wanted to start programming for Mac OS X. MacAlarm is my first for-real-use-project on this platform. Programming an Alarm Clock is a very cool First-Timer if you want to start developping Applications. In a very small project I have learned a lot about Cocoa Bindings, Core Data, Quicktime, Applescript, and the Sparkle- & Growl-Frameworks.

Really important Warning: Beta Phase

MacAlarm is in beta Phase. It works well for me, and it does not crash on my Systems - but I'm not sure if this goes for you, too. If you have any whishes for future releases, please tell me about it. And if MacAlarm crashes just before it should wake you up, send me a mail too.

I really mean it: THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. Do not try to sue me, if MacAlarm trashes all your Calendar entries, kills iTunes or frightens your cat. All of this is quite improbable, but - you know, your Mac is a Computer too, and Computers and their software tend to do weird things. Especially in Beta Phase. Especially if it is the first real Application of the Programmer.

The most probable incident is, that MacAlarm just crashes instead of waking you up. As you don't want to jeopardize your Job, please make sure, that it works as supposed before the first real use. In the first night, set up a regular Alarm Clock too!

System Requirements

  • MacAlarm needs OS X, namely OS 10.4 Tiger. It won't work on Jaguar or Panther and it never will, as it rellies heavily on Programming Features introduced with Tiger (CoreData is sooooo cool).
  • A current Version of iTunes will be a good thing too. I developped and tested MacAlarm on iTunes Version 6.0.5. As far as I know, the relevant Connections did not change at least since iTunes 4 - but I did not test it on such an old Version.

Price and Source-Code

MacAlarm is free.

Even more: MacAlarm is somewhat OpenSource, if you want to look and/or alter at the underlying Code, you can so - even if there is a risk for serious Developpers at dying from laughing if you are looking at it. Remember, this is my first real project on OS X. My C is miserable, my Obj-C is rookie-Style, and I never read anything about AppleScript.

I have not yet installed my TRAC-Server and did not use Plain Subversion either - so if you want to look at the Code, you have to Download the zip: MacAlarm-source-0.5.zip. Please don't laugh.

Known Bugs and untested things

  • If you want to awake your Mac from sleeping, MacAlarm will open the corresponding System Preference Panel. If you have to authenticate for changing System Preferences, this will not help you at all, since this panel has no Lock-Icon. Close the Sheet, authenticate yourself with the Lock on the Energy-Saving-Panel, and reopen the sheet again. Sorry about this.
  • iTunes is know for a crappy behaviour regarding new Versions: Whenever you install a new Version of iTunes, the next time you start it up, it will present you a license sheet - during which you cannot do anything, until you accept the license. It seems that iTunes does not even listen to Applescript in this moment, so MacAlarm will not be able to query iTunes for the playlists - worse: it wont be able to tell iTunes to wake you up. If you update iTunes - be sure to test MacAlarm on it before you use it.

Future Features

  • UI Refinements
  • Better integration for putting your Mac to sleep and waking it up.