Although I’ve never officially launched my new site yet I’m sure many of you are reading. So just for a heads up I will officially launch the site with a sweet give away. When will that happen… I don’t know, haha. Let me ask you this though, If I were to give away something what would you want it to be? Anyway back to the article…
Here is something I’ve wanted to do on a regular basis. Near the beginning of the month I want to share with you one of my favorite Mac apps. It may be one I use daily, as is the case with this one, or it could be one that provided one awesome use and that was all. Whatever it does I promise it will be worthwhile for you to check it out. Especially if you have a Mac, if you are running Windows sometimes there is an alternative but really you should save up and get yourself a Mac. Just a suggestion.
Alarm Clock 2 is the app that I want to rave about today. As the name implies it’s an alarm clock for your computer. I know many people that use their phones as their alarm clock and that runs the risk of accidentally turning off your alarm like my girlfriend does quite often. I am even guilty of that at times, accidentally turning off the whole alarm instead of snooze. One good way to avoid that is to just get enough sleep, so that when your alarm does go off you can be somewhat cognitive about what you are doing. I find that hard to do as a student but I’m working towards better sleep. The other way to do that is to use Alarm Clock 2.
At the apps website you can download the app FOR FREE, donations welcomed, and install it within under 5 minutes. Once you’ve got it up and running it should appear in your menu bar in the top right. Simply click on it to bring it to life and start setting alarms. You can set an alarm for just one time, or you can have them repeating. I have 3 repeating alarms at the moment. One for Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes and the other for Tuesday and Thursday classes. Then my final alarm is every Sunday at 6:45am. These are always on unless I turn them off if I’ll be gone for break or something. When I do take a nap I usually use my phone as an alarm, but you can just set a one time alarm for the same thing. I usually nap out in the living room though away from my iMac.
Once you’ve got the alarms set be sure to pick what you want to be woken up to, and how you want it to do it. There is a great feature called Easy Wake that slowly fades in your choice of alarm. This is much nicer to wake up to than it blaring right off the bat. Now what do you want to hear as you wake up? There is the option to play anything from your iTunes. Even playlists, so make a wake up playlist and wake up to that everyday. I chose to wake up to your normal alarm sound. Call me weird, or old fashioned, I just don’t want to ruin a song by associating it with waking up. Although I love music in the morning. We’ll see I may change my stance on that.
Finally when your alarm is going off there are two ways to react to that. To snooze hit any key BESIDES THE ENTER KEY. If you hit the enter key your alarm will be stopped for the day. That will again go back to our original problem of turning off your alarm. If I may offer a tip use your mouse to physically click snooze instead of slamming keys in your mid awake state. It works wonders for me.
Well that really does say it all for this app. Short and sweet. It turns your 1,000 + maching into a reliable alarm clock. I’d highly recommend it as it’s the one I use. If you have any other suggestions leave a comment and let me know what you use. Waking up is critical, missing appointments, classes, meetings, is bad on your reputation. Thanks for reading the first of many in the series. Have a good one.
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