Be sure to check the end of this post for details on your chance to win a free copy of Playlist Alarm Clock!

We covered Chilli X last year, with their release of the successful iPhone to-do application, "Done" (iTunes link), and again with myCal, their app for creating custom calendar wallpapers for your iPhone lock screen (be sure to check out the free, user-generated wallpapers they're making available). They've been pretty quiet for a while, updating and tweaking Done (now at version 1.7), handling an App Store rejection of their own, and working on a newly-released app: Playlist Alarm Clock.

Playlist Alarm Clock is not necessarily a new or novel idea, but it's well-implemented. It's an iPhone app which allows you to create playlists, one for falling asleep and one for waking up. You can configure the length of time the sleep playlist will play, and how long it will take to fade out, as well as a fade-in time for the wake-up playlist. Setting times and fades comes down to a couple of taps, and adding songs to the playlists is done with a familiar iPod interface with full access to your library and playlists. If you're generally drowsy in the morning, you're covered as well: the snooze time can be configured to five, ten, fifteen or thirty minutes and is just a groggy tap away.

As is often the case, there are a few things I'd love to see enhanced. First, a night mode, ala the excellent Night Stand (iTunes link), which would let Playlist Alarm Clock function more appropriately as an always-on clock. Currently, the time display is large and easy to see, but the brightness of the interface is not ideal for bedside use. Second -- and this is really my only other complaint -- removing songs from the playlist doesn't seem to be an intuitive process. Accidentally tapping the wrong song during playlist creation seems to be a pretty permanent blunder, requiring a do-over of the playlist creation sequence. Beyond that, this app does exactly what the wrapper says, and I'm looking forward to falling asleep tonight to some favorites of mine, and hopefully not jarring my wife into a bad mood when my personal idea of "wakeup" music fades in.

Playlist Alarm Clock is $1.99US in the App Store. However, Chilli X is offering TUAW readers a chance at one of 10 free copies. All you have to do is submit (in the comments) your ideal playlists, one for falling asleep, and one for waking up. Be creative, be funny, be brilliant ... Chilli X will choose their favorites winners will be randomly selected next Thursday and promo codes will be sent to the winners.

Here are the rules and a link to the legal statement:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
• To enter leave a comment listing your choices for sleep and wake playlists.
• The comment must be left before Wednesday, July 22, 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Ten winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize: Promo code for one copy of Playlist Alarm Clock (US$1.99 value)
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Good luck!

We have written about Aurora before, and now a new version of this freeware alarm clock app is available. It will still awake you with some sweet, sweet tunes from your iTunes library (you can even use a playlist, or smart playlist). It now supports a snooze function using the Apple Remote, which is pretty darned cool if you ask me. It also supports playing radio or TV shows from EyeTV.

Aurora is a Universal Binary, and is free (donations are welcome).

The first bell that rung in my ear when Steve announced Mac OS X 10.5's ship date of Spring 2007 was: "Apple just pulled a Microsoft". I know, I know: those words might be nails on the chalkboard in your head, but it's true. Leopard was originally promised for Fall 2006, and now it's been bumped back to 2007.

Now don't get me wrong, if they need the time to work on it and bang out all the new features (including those secret ones they couldn't even show today) then by all means the company should take their time. I'm simply interested in the ramifications, if any, of a delay like this.

Microsoft has received boatloads of criticism from every media outlet imaginable for continually delaying Longhorn Vista for the last 4 years. Some have postulated that today's modern and feature-packed OSes might be getting too big for their britches. Even those recent prominent un-switchers in the media also cited buggy software and wonky Mac OS X problems as part of their reasoning for jumping ship.

I'm not trying to Pull a Dvorak™ and invent some crisis here or anything, but could some of these complications be making their way into the Apple side of the fence? Each new version of Mac OS X has brought incredible innovation with it (and these 10 new Leopard features are no exception), but also slightly more instability and 'growing pains' as well. Mail.app is widely harped on for a good number of reasons, namely instability and flakiness. GarageBand rocks, but only until you try to use the fancy podcast recording features. Even the cutting-edge new Spotlight is a great concept with a decent implementation, but it too suffers problems of inaccuracy, sluggish performance (even on recent machines like my MBP) and over-activity.

What do you TUAW readers think though? Is the new Leopard ship date cause for alarm? Do you think you'll pick up the 1.0 release, or wait for initial reports and the subsequent updates? Sound off!

[UPDATE: For clarification, many reports since the introduction of Leopard have changed their tune for a release of 'late 2006/early 2007', but plenty of them, at least around the original announcement, specified Fall 2006.]

We've blogged iCalFix before, back when it was just a fledgling 0.1 release that didn't even have a GUI interface (you had to edit a pref file lying around in ~/Library). For those who don't remember: it's a simple iCal plugin that automatically adds a reminder to every event you create.

In this latest 0.5 release, iCal has become a true-blue iCal plugin, with its own preference pane and everything (As you can see, Robert Blum, iCalFix's creator, is looking for an icon designer. Check his blog for contact details). Now it's possible to specify your own alarm time for new events, as well as which sound to use, right from within iCal's preferences.

iCalFix is donationware and available from Robert Blum's site.

[via Hawk Wings]

If you're a Growl fanatic, or maybe iCal's alarms just aren't cutting it for you, a forum thread at cocoaforge might provide you with some options for getting iCal and Growl to shake hands. Discussion has included various methods of using AppleScript, hacking the innards of iCal and even replacing the GUI option of emailing a reminder with sending it to Growl. Either way, it doesn't sound like any of the methods are for the meek of heart, so if you don't feel like digging around in application bundles and AppleScript, you might want to wait for a prettier solution.

[via Hawk Wings]

The Gmail-Growl Utility that adds some seriously handy features to Google's official Gmail Notifier has been updated with a functionality face-lift and some fixes. It now has an option to toggle on/off Growl notifications for those times when you just need silence, and in Mac OS X Tiger you can now drag and drop notification field elements such as sender, subject and date, to build the actual notification you want to see (Panther users can still copy/paste text blocks to customize this notification).

Gmail-Growl Utility has also gone fully universal as long as you're using Google's latest Notifier version (1.8.2). It is also donationware (bonus points: the dev donates 10% to charity) and available from Waffle Software.

I had my doubts about iAlertU, but I am big enough to admit that I was wrong (though I waited a few days just to be sure). iAlertU does, in fact, work and there is a free beta so you can protect your MacBook Pro.

The developer is hard at work on another version of the software, so be sure to keep your eyes out for it.

For all those times when adding a quick reminder to iCal is too cumbersome, or you might not be online so the Backpack widget can do its thing, the Reminder widget might be right up your alley. As you can see, the widget has a simple interface allowing you to add some type of a reminder name/message, along with a reminder time. As an added bonus, this widget actually adds events to its own iCal calendar.

The Reminder widget is, of course, free and available from DashboardWidgets.com.