We’ve been busy with Awaken 4.1 - it’s a fairly big update. We’re including a lot of the feature suggestions that have been sent in and fixing any bugs reported. In addition to that Awaken will be localized in French and German.
Tonight we have a sneak peek at a new feature…
Up until now Awaken has had to rely on iTunes to play your playlists. For the most part this is okay and it’s great if you’re using wireless speakers via AirTunes. But sometimes iTunes just doesn’t want to play nice. So coming in Awaken 4.1 we’ll be giving you a choice to have Awaken play your iTunes music or have iTunes play it as its been doing.
Advantages of Awaken playing your iTunes content:
- Rock solid reliability can be achieved when not depending on communication to iTunes
- Better performance
- Video playback within Awaken
Advantages of using iTunes to play music:
- AirTunes support…
Awaken will be the default choice - but you can easily change it in the preferences. We’ll also be working on improving iTunes playback for those who want to use AirTunes. We decided that providing the choice makes things work for everyone.
Check out the video to see the new preference and Awaken playing your music and videos…
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February 25th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
That’s good. I didn’t like how Aurora forced users to use its built-in iTunes player instead of using iTunes. I like how iTunes has scrobble support with Last.fm/Audioscrobbler.
February 27th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Awesome! Giving users the option is definitely the best and will one up Aurora in this area. Thanks for the sneak peak. Looking forward to 4.1 and the other great features you have planned. Love the video ability as well. Any chance for an option to make video fullscreen, say with a smaller clock at the top or bottom?
February 27th, 2008 at 9:18 am
@Britonius - I’m glad that you are please with what’s coming. Regarding fullscreen video, we will be offering some video preferences in the update after 4.1. We want to get this release done ASAP. As soon as it is done we’ll be starting 4.2 which will expand on this new functionality. We have a ton planned
February 29th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Also, it would be nice to have a “Skip next alarm” or “Skip next occurrence of alarm” button in the Awaken program, as well as the Menubar icon.
Thanks
March 1st, 2008 at 8:39 am
While I like the itunes integration sometimes just an alarm (wav) would be great. I use Awaken a lot while listening to itunes and working. This does not fit well in the current model.
Just an idea.
March 1st, 2008 at 8:49 am
@jeremy - you can do this by choosing “Sound” as the alarm type. You can select from any of the dozen built-in sounds or add your own audio files.
March 18th, 2008 at 12:53 am
I definitely like this feature. One benefit that you can add to your list is that your iTunes play counts won’t get incremented. Right now, all of the songs in my “wake up” playlist always show up in my “most played” smart playlist in iTunes, even though I would never want to listen to them except to wake up.
I may be unique with my situation, but I’d actually like this to be a per-alarm setting rather than a preference. I have an alarm set for 6:00 that plays my “wake up” music playlist, I’d like to not use iTunes (for the playcount issue). However, at 6:30 I have a second alarm set to start playing a BBC news podcast. (So that I can listen to the news while I get ready for the day.) If Awaken handles playing the second alarm, the podcast will never be marked as listened to, and the bookmark will be set (to pick up in the same place that I leave off). …but that’s a minor peeve.
March 25th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Does this require that iTunes be open?
Also, I think you guys should redesign the menubar icon. The old one from Awaken 4.0 (before the 4.0.1 update) was perfect. This new one is too bland and generic, and it looks a little strange in comparison to the other icons.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:04 am
The only features I really miss
EyeTV support
Show next alarm time in dock or in menu
allow user to record audio or video message (isight) as wakeup sound/video
March 30th, 2008 at 7:49 am
May I voice a faint warning amidst all this cheering for more? I fear that as further and further functionality is added to this great application it will start to suffer from that unpleasantness known as feature creep. As a Mac user I feel that simplicity and an elegant interface is key to developing great applications and that Awaken may lose some of that elegance if its developers add everything but the kitchen sink.
For instance, I feel that the new “status text” displayed at the bottom of the application window, between the buttons, adds very little of value but quite a lot of visual noise.
March 30th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Something I’ve wished for is beign able to define a keyboard key (like space bar) to to activate the snooze button. There have been a few times when I’ve accidentally ended the alarm instead of snoozing it, and ended up oversleeping.
Also, if a new song were played each time the snooze activated then it would help give enough variety to actually wake me up.
April 3rd, 2008 at 5:09 am
Hi, it is looking really cool. A feature i would like was the abillity to make Awaken force the internal speakers as sound output, if it is possible. I forgot one night to unplug my headphones, and woke an hour later
April 7th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Jerry,
For those of us who actually buy our music and keep them as protected MP4s, will Awaken be able to handle this?
April 21st, 2008 at 11:06 am
Hi,
Any possibility of having more than one egg timer at a time? I was just using Awaken for cooking, and needed multiple egg timers. I ended up having to reset the timer each time. I guess I could have used the alarm function, but it’s more handy to be able to set up an egg timer for 5 minutes, rather than an alarm to go off at 3:05pm or whatever.
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:30 pm
So I have a theory: Jerry died sometime in March. Possibly due to a network of international espionage and intrigue; possibly after being taken captive by the restless natives. We’ll never know. All we do know is that 4.1 was promised to be coming “soon” after 4.0.0-4.0.11 came out in a firestorm early in the year. The last update came February 24, and it looked like it would be right around the corner, given the precedence. Nearly 2 months later, the only news is that it is now part of the macupdate pack. Why the bundling at discount prices? Why the lack of communication? My eyebrow, dear friends, is raised. We’ll miss you Jerry. Tell the “real” Paul McCartney we miss him too.
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:13 am
Whoah Sam - that’s a bit drastic
I’ve been very busy working on 4.1 - its a major update. I write a blog post once I have a lot to show. In between blog posts I’m very active on Twitter and I post screenshots and video on Flickr (announced on Twitter). At the end of my latest blog posts including this one you’ll see “Twitter - I post what I’m working on with Awaken in real-time.”
http://twitter.com/jerrybrace
Awaken 4.1 photoset on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/embraceware/sets/72157604416145970/