I’ve had the opportunity to test several different alarm clock applications for my computer this week and by the far the best one out of the bunch is Aurora from Metaquark.

Aurora uses the music in your iTunes library as the alarm clock sound, but that’s not why it’s so great. What makes this app truly great is the number of features it includes such as fade-in/fade-out functionality, a fall asleep mode, options to wake/sleep/turn off/log out when an alarm goes on, and the ability to run other applications during an alarm. In short, Aurora has all the best features of many good individual alarm clock apps all rolled into one.

But perhaps the one option that I haven’t seen in any other alarm clock app for the Mac is the option to put the computer to sleep after a DVD has finished playing. This is especially good when I just want to fall asleep to a snowboarding video or a music DVD.

I highly recommend this app.