What’s waking me up?
Years ago, I had watched a Japanese Anime series called Bubblegum Crisis. Of course, being Sci-fi and a cartoon there were many fantastical gadgetry and neat technology. One such combo, that pertains to this entry, was a laptop one of the protagonists used. It was sleek looking and had a cool OS, but the nifty part? It was used as an alarm to wake the protagonist up. Now, there are many programs out there that could be similar, however how many of them could wake a computer from sleep and activate the alarm? That’s right, the laptop was in sleep mode and the alarm triggered and woke the laptop and blared its incessant buzzing. Ever since, I always kept an eye out for an application like that. Unfortunately, I didn’t find anything for Windows, however my search ended when I got a Macbook Pro.
The first application I encountered was Aurora. It did the job fairly well but settled into the dust for a time. Recently I stumbled upon Awaken and I must say that its sleeker and sexier (not to mention cheaper than the current release of Aurora). While both hook into iTunes so you can play your music, use the Apple remote to snooze or turn off an alarm and both have a sleep setting to play your tunes and stop, putting the system into Sleep mode, after a defined amount of time, Awaken’s presentation is very well done and just looks better. Call me superficial but it’s one of the big reasons why I have a Macbook Pro and an iPhone. They look hot and work pretty darn good. One thing going for Aurora at the moment is its support of EyeTV, which Awaken doesn’t. I don’t use EyeTV so it’s not a problem for me, however for those that do, you might want to keep that in mind. Perhaps the cost of Aurora is worth it then?
I’ve been using Awaken for a week and half now and have been very satisfied. The full screen mode doesn’t emit too much light to be bothersome when using it at night during Sleep mode, but the text is large enough for me to see from my bed to check the time, either at night or when the alarm is blaring in the morning. Oh, and the developer is on Twitter so be sure to check out what he has to say about the new version of Awaken.
