That Not So Fresh Feeling

I’ve meant to use Skitch for a while, and finally got around to using it today. It’s pretty cool. For instance, you can do a search for “phpbb is a piece” and find some fun links:

Then, if you want, you can do some fun stuff to it. Like add some comments:

Tada!

Awesome. Takes about 2 seconds.

So, after yesterday’s post about the move to shareware of Aurora (which, again, I don’t begrudge the dev that–it just doesn’t fit into my plans), I got an email from Jerry of Embraceware, the creators of another Mac alarm clock app called Awaken.

Jerry had a good deal for me: a free copy of Awaken.

That’s pretty amazing. I’m a small little blog, written by a web dork. My readership is pretty small. But Jerry is the smartest of marketers. What better way to get the word out about your product than to get it into someone’s hands who’ll try it, write about it, and probably evangelize for it (just based off the fact that it was such a great out of the blue offer).

So I installed Awaken last night, and I woke up to this morning to Bloc Party. It works as advertised, has a pretty nifty interface, and has one feature that Aurora doesn’t: it doesn’t require you to turn off your screen saver password or turn on auto-login. Both of those lower the security of your Mac (particularly if you’re using a laptop, like me), and it always bugged me about Aurora.

Now, with Awaken, even though my machine was locked, the alarm clock turned on and work me up, allowed me to snooze it or turn off the alarm, and then I could go about my daily business.

I like that. A lot.

It’s a pretty app too (especially in full screen mode when you wake up). Here’s a taste (from Embraceware’s flickr account):

Awaken rocks a good bit. I’m probably going to move to it as my alarm clock–it’ll be a whole lot less abrasive than my blaring alarm clock from 1988 (that my girlfriend despises). And then I’ll probably start using it as my sleep timer too, since it’d be pretty cool to toss a movie into iTunes and have it shut down my Mac when it’s done.

Jerry’s done pretty darn good marketing here. I would probably have not even considered Awaken before, but now I’m evangelizing it. I love the internet.

You can check out Jerry’s blog for more info on Awaken.

Aurora’s a pretty cool app for the Mac. I don’t use it very often, but when I’ve been traveling, it’s been nice to have a backup alarm. As I do every day, I ran my little Application Update widget and got really excited when I saw a new release! New cool, free software!

I like things that are free.

Unfortunately, Aurora’s become a shareware app. Well, it’s not really unfortunate. It’s a cool app. I’m sure there’s people for whom it’ll be worth the $15. It’s just not for me; I don’t use it enough. So now I’m left to wonder “Do I keep the old version and get taunted by the AppUpdate widget every time there’s a new release? Or do I remove the old version and learn to live without it?”

Really, that’s what’s currently going through my brain. I think I might actually remove the app. It’s no offense to Aurora, I just don’t want to have that pang every time the widget displays new stuff.