Alarm Clock Pro

Alarm Clock Pro makes organizing your life via your desktop a breeze, assuming you can untangle the innovative options. By offering users a wide swath of date-keeping and time-monitoring options you can make your life simpler, however, learning the program itself may take up the bulk of this newfound time.

Alarm Clock Pro will appeal to anyone who is used to the multiple alarm features that Outlook offers. Unlike Outlook, this simple to install 15-day free trial is independent of a calendar or e-mail system. The many unique aspects are the alarm's capability to function on a specific day and time, in a predetermined amount of minutes and reoccur at any frequency. Alarm Clock Pro is set up to automatically make a simple alarm noise. However, the appeal lies in the program's capability to open your iTunes playlist as an alarm, open a specific Web site, or even play a quote upon your chosen date and time.

All these options sound like a lot of fun, but the setup is not intuitive. There are no options to easily determine how to draw from a user's music playlist or or add the quote. In our eyes, users must have an advanced technical knowledge to have the alarm clock do more than simply chime. In addition, the opening menu offers help repairing missing or corrupt files, which seems like a nice option, but raises the question as to how often these problems must arise to require such a choice.

Although we liked the numerous ways to configure an alarm, the unintuitive approach means Alarm Clock Pro is best left in the hands of more experienced users.