CyberNotes: Free Alarm Clocks for Windows & Mac

Time Saving Tuesday

Windows; Mac
Finding a good alarm clock to help get you up in the wee hours of the morning can be tough. I have a tendency of placing the clock out of arms reach so that I have to get out of bed in order to turn it off. What I use as an alarm varies from things like my cellphone or TV all the way to my computer.

For some odd reason it seems as though free alarm clocks for computers are tough to come by these days. A few years ago we covered a decent alarm clock called Citrus that offered a lot of the functionality people would expect, and the best part was that it was free. Unfortunately the freeware stage didn’t last long, and it’s now a $13 program. Similarly Aurora for Mac used to be free, but it now bears a $22 price tag.

So today we’re showing our appreciation to the developers who’ve taken the time to build powerful alarm clock applications, and are currently offering them for free!

–College Alarm Clock (Homepage)–

Windows only
This alarm clock is particularly useful for people that have different schedules each day of the week, and as the name implies the target audience is college students. Using it is simple: download and run the program… there’s nothing to install. After that you can start tinkering around with the different configuration options.

You’ll quickly notice that there are 7 tabs spread out across the top for each day of the week. For each day you can designate a different time that coincides with your schedule, which for college students works out perfectly. It doesn’t exactly have a fancy interface, but it can be rather handy if your schedule varies throughout the week.

–Alarm Clock 2 (Homepage)–

Mac only
This is a powerful alarm application that is not only capable of handling alarms, but can also serve as a stopwatch or timer. I’d have to say that the best part is the fact that it’s able to wake your computer from sleep to sound your alarm. That’s great for anyone who doesn’t like to leave their computer running overnight.

Here are some of the other features that really make it stand out from the crowd:

• Set as many alarms as you want
• Set repeating alarms or one-time alarms
• Wake up to any song, playlist or podcast in your iTunes library
• Wake up peacefully with “easy wake” – a configurable option that slowly increases the volume of your alarm over time

–TinyAlarm (Homepage)–

Mac only
The name of this program gives the impression that this is a basic run-of-the-mill alarm clock, but that’s not the case at all. It doesn’t integrate with your iTunes library like the previous application does, but it’s capable of doing most things people would want from an alarm clock:

• Choose from System sounds or sounds in your personal library
• Choose how many chimes sound when the alarm goes off
• Add a text reminder to alarms that get displayed in a Growl notification
• Fuzzy timers: Timers that are “Exact” will simply add the minutes or hours to the current time. Timers that are “About” (for example, “About 15 minutes”), are rounded off.

–Overview–

If you use an alarm clock on your computer we’d love to hear which one. The selection of free solutions seems to be dwindling, but hopefully that won’t be a growing trend.