Alarm Clock 2
FREE full-featured alarm clock for Mac OS X!

• About Alarm Clock
• Screen Shots
• What's New
• Frequently Asked Questions

The icon changes to reflect the status of the application.
There are 3 possible icons, reflecting 3 different meanings.

1. Black and White icon - There are no alarms set. (Alarms may be scheduled, just not enabled)
2. Blue icon with red bells - Alarms are set, but the application is not configured to wake the computer from sleep.
3. Blue icon - Alarms are set, and the application is ready to wake the computer from sleep.

This allows the user to tell, at a glance, what the application will do.
You can also change the application settings to use only black and white icons, if you prefer a more traditional look.

Most other alarm clock applications choose to play the alarms/music via iTunes (via AppleScript). I deliberately decided against this route. There are many reasons for this. First of all, an alarm clock should be as stable as possible. Playing music through iTunes adds a dependancy on a 3rd party application that was not designed with the functionality of an alarm clock in mind. If an alarm is supposed to go off in the morning, an alarm should go off no matter what.

Consider a few of the following scenarios if iTunes was depended upon:

• The alarm is set to play a specific song, but the song was deleted.
• The alarm is set to play a specific playlist, but you renamed the playlist, or deleted it.
• The alarm is set to play a radio station, but the internet is down.
• iTunes was recently upgraded, and requires you to re-agree to the license next time you launch it. The alarm application launches it for the alarm...
• You had iTunes set to play to your airTunes speakers, but you left your airport card turned off.
• You had the iTunes preference panel open. (Which prevents AppleScript from working)
• You had a "Get Info" panel open. (Which also prevents AppleScript from working)

What happens in the scenarios above? Do you miss your final exam? Do you arrive late to work on the day of your presentation? It's partly due to these shortcomings and oversights that I decided to make my own alarm clock application in the first place.
I take stability very seriously.
I want people to be able to depend on the alarm clock, and not feel the need to set a separate alarm "just in case."

If you use a different alarm clock on your computer, try out some of the scenarios above. Would you still wake up?
Also, what happens if you pause iTunes during the alarm? What happens if you pause it with an apple remote? Does the alarm automatically snooze for you? Did the alarm even realize that iTunes is no longer playing a song?

Alarm Clock 2 avoids all the above problems by playing the song internally.
If a song fails to play, it knows immediately. (And plays a backup sound)
If a playlist no longer exists, it knows about it.
If you pause the music, it's because you choose to snooze the alarm.
In other words, Alarm Clock 2 is in full control, and knows everything that is happening concerning your alarm.
It's only job is to wake you up in the morning, and I believe you'll find that it does it's job perfectly.

The application configures itself based on the date/time formatting in the system preferences.
To change your settings, go to "System Preferences" -> "International" -> "Formats"
After editing your Short date/time formats, the application will change accordingly.
The application supports many date formats, such as:
MM/DD/YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY, DD.MM.YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD, etc.
It also supports a 24 hour clock. (Like 14:30 instead of 2:30 PM)

Mac OS X (being a rock solid secure OS) requires administrative privileges to do many things, such as schedule the computer to wake up at a certain time. Thus, you have to type in your password once to give the application permission to do this task.
Note: New versions of the application may require you to authenicate again. You've probably seen something like this with other applications on your system.

Nope. Not only does it never store it, the application never even sees your password. An operating system call takes care of requesting your password and granting one-time authentication. That's why you see the familiar Mac OS X "Authenticate" dialog. Chalk this up to Apple for providing such a secure OS!

The current list of localizations include:

• Traditional Chinese
• French
• German
• Bulgarian
• Danish
• Spanish
• Dutch
• Italian
• Hebrew
• Portuguese
• Polish
• Finnish
• Russian
• Japanese
• Swedish
• Hungarian
• Greek
• Czech

However, I would like to localize the app to as many languages as possible.
If you do not see your language/localization here, and would be interested in helping, feel free to send me an email at: robbiehanson15@gmail.com

The kill alarm feature is a safety net if you ever forget to turn off your alarm clock when you're not there. That way you don't annoy your neighbors all day long!
If the alarm goes off for X amount of minutes (as in the music has been constantly playing for X minutes), it is automatically turned off.
It will NOT be turned off during snooze.
It will NOT be turned off because you hit snooze 5 times. (Hit snooze as many times as you want...I always do!)
You can think of this as a timer...
When the alarm goes off the timer starts ticking
If you hit snooze, the timer is paused and reset
When the alarm goes off after snooze, the timer starts ticking again

Not a problem! The alarm will go off at the correct time for the time zone the computer is set to. That is, if you set an alarm for 9 in the morning, the alarm will go off when your computer says it's 9 in the morning. Pretty simple huh?
So for example, if you live in New York City, and you set an alarm for 9 AM, then fly to San Francisco overnight, and update the time zone for your MacBook on the plane, the alarm will go off at 9 AM San Francisco time. You don't even have to restart the alarm clock application.
(Frequent travelers ask me this all the time, as many applications don't properly update when the time zone is changed.)

The application looks for the file: "~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml"
This file contains all the information about your iTunes library, and the application parses this information to show you the songs and playlists in your iTunes library.
On some machines (very rarely) this file is somehow placed in an alternate location. For example, it may be placed on an external drive. In which case, I've implemented a workaround.
Peform the following steps:

1. Find the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file.
   Spotlight works great for this task.
   If you find several files, choose the one with the newest modification date (In 'Get Info')
   
2. Write down the full path to this file
   You can find the path to the file in the 'Get Info' window. It's right after the word 'Where:' For example, if the file is located on an external drive (Named 'Lacie'), the full path may be:
   /Volumes/Lacie/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml
3. Open up the Terminal application
   This is located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal
4. Execute the following command (replacing the last part with the path you wrote down in step 2)
   defaults write com.digitallity.alarmclock2 'XMLPath' '/Volumes/Lacie/Music/iTunes Music Library.xml'
   You can copy and paste the above line into the application.
   This command is modifying the preferences for the Alarm Clock application.
   It is simply telling the application to look for the xml file in an alternate location.
   
5. Restart the alarm clock application, and you should see your iTunes library.

Note: In version 2.2.2, many of the problems causing the iTunes library to not be found were fixed. If you have this version or later, you most likely won't need the above solution. However, it still may be used if you encounter problems, or would like to specify a particular iTunes library if you use more than one.

Unfortunately No.
I'm actually a powerbook user, and I've been looking for a solution for this for some time.
To date, I don't know if one exists.
Here is some more detail:

When you authenticate you give the application (actually a small 'helper' application) permission to tell the OS to wake from sleep at a particular time. This is necessary because only the OS has the ability to wake the computer from sleep. So right before the computer goes to sleep, the alarm clock program informs the OS that it must wake up at a certain time. The OS (I'm assuming) writes this info to the firmware and then moves the applications out of memory and goes to sleep. If the computer isn't a laptop, or the lid isn't shut, everything works just fine. The problem is, if it is a laptop and the lid is shut, the OS completely ignores the request to wake from sleep. I have no idea how to get around this problem at this point since I can't change the operating system.

The workaround is to simply not shut the lid to the laptop. Just manually put it to sleep, or let it go to sleep itself.
If you have any idea on how to fix this problem, or you know of any software that can get around this problem, I'd love to hear about it.

Unfortunately No.
When you enable the "Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver" option in System Preferences, you are enabling a SECURITY option. As such, it is implemented in a very secure manner by Apple.

Although you may have authorized the Alarm Clock to wake your computer from sleep, there is nothing the application can do to get past the password prompt. When this dialog comes up, it waits for a password to be typed in, and the password must be manually typed in by a user on the keyboard. No application can type in a password for you. Which in terms of security, is a very good thing. The reason for using the security option is because people have extra sensitive information on their computer that they must ensure other people cannot access. If an application such as the alarm clock could somehow bypass this security then a thief who steals your laptop could simply wait for an alarm to go off, and would then be able to get into your system.

The problem comes from the fact that if a password is not typed in after 30 seconds, the OS forces the computer to go back to sleep. It doesn't ask running applications if it's OK to go back to sleep, it simply tells running applications that the computer is going to sleep NOW. So at this point the alarm clock has no option but to pretend the snooze button was pressed, and schedule the computer to wake up again in a few minutes. Many users will thus see the alarm clock wake the computer from sleep, play the alarm for a few seconds, and then immediately go back to sleep. This process is then repeated every several minutes depending on your default snooze duration settings.

The only solution is to disable the password prompt option. This may not be an option for everyone as security concerns vary depending on the situation. I apologize if this is a problem, but please bare in mind that this application was designed to be used on home computers. This is just the nature of security. It eventually gets to the point of a compromise, with security on one side and convenience on the other.

Easy wake works by gradually increasing the SYSTEM volume. This is the safest way to do it, as users don't have to worry about setting their volume to the proper level every night. However, if you use digital audio out on your computer, the system volume cannot be changed. This is why the standard volume keys on the keyboard don't work. Instead, you must increase/decrease the volume on your receiver (or whatever). To accomodate for this, I've implemented a hack that will instead gradually increase the volume of the audio stream Alarm Clock outputs. This should have approximately the same effect. To switch to this method, simply peform the following steps:

1. Open up the Terminal application
   This is located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal
2. Execute the following command
   defaults write com.digitallity.alarmclock2 'DigitalAudio' -boolean yes
   You can copy and paste the above line into the application.
   This command is modifying the preferences for the Alarm Clock application.
   It is simply telling the application that the user is using digital audio.
   
3. Restart the alarm clock application, and you should hear the volume scale properly with your digital output setup.

I'm currently looking for a way at automatically detecting whether or not the user is using digital output, and automatically choosing the proper scaling technique based on this information.