Aurora Alarm Clock Editor's Review

'Aurora' is an application that can put your Mac in sleep mode. It can also take it out of sleep and start iTunes or a radio channel from Eye TV.

The idea of using your Macintosh as an alarm clock is not bad, but the implementation isn't the best. The first thing that didn't work was the 'Preferences' panel. When you access it, the program stops responding.

Putting your Mac to sleep requires you to have a song playing in iTunes. Otherwise it won't work.

Taking your Mac out of sleep requires administrator privileges, so you need to run the application as an administrator. This functionality works well and it gives you several options, which can customize the alarm.

During testing, my Mac kept going to sleep when it was in the idle state. I couldn't find how to turn that 'feature' off and it was quite annoying, because it happened several times during tests. Shutting down Aurora and Aurora Wakeup Helper didn't stop it. Furthermore, the 'Restart', 'Shutdown', and 'Logout' buttons weren't responding.

Oh boy, shutting down the Mac, without holding the power button pressed, was a real challenge. I found a solution though, I activated the root account, I activated the fast user switching, I switched to the 'Login Window', and then I restarted the operating system by using root privileges. Quite a lot operations for a simple shutdown, isn't it? Well, Aurora pushes you sometimes to the limit.

Pluses: It can put your Mac in sleep mode and it can take your Mac out of sleep. It can be used as an alarm clock. It has even a snooze functionality.

Drawbacks / flaws: Is quite unstable, the 'Preferences' panel doesn't work, and it has some 'hidden features' that disables the 'Restart', 'Shutdown', and 'Logout' buttons. Putting your Mac to sleep requires that you manually start iTunes and play a song.

In conclusion: This application would be a great tool without all this issues. I am looking forward to see what the future versions of this program will bring.

version reviewed: 3.2.2 r495