I’m extremely happy to announce the immediate release of Aurora 4, which builds on Aurora’s two years of success and is the first commercial product of metaquark.
Aurora 4 comes with all features you know and love from Aurora 3, and has greatly improved usability and reliability. The alarm properties are much more accessible. Alarms, playback/snooze and fall asleep modes have their dedicated panels. Aurora still builds on iTunes playlists, but doesn’t use iTunes itself for playback, greatly enhancing reliability. Aurora 4 takes full advantage of Mac OS X Leopard technologies, and does not run on Mac OS X Tiger or earlier. Check out the product page for more feature details.
The decision to make Aurora 4 payware (Aurora 4 retails at the price of 15.00 EUR per license) hasn’t been easy, but it has finally been taken in order to allow metaquark to spend more time on development of Aurora, AppFresh and Home Zone. We’re grateful to the time when Aurora survived on donations, and all donors receive up to 5 free licenses and Aurora 4 Beta testers receive a 50% discount when purchasing Aurora 4.
We’d love to hear about your thoughts and feedback. Leave a comment on this post, or contact our support team. You can follow further development on this blog or via Twitter. Also, show your support for Aurora on osx.iusethis.com, the awesome community-based Mac software site.
February 6th, 2008 at 12:23 am
[...] Aurora’s become a shareware app. Well, it’s not really unfortunate. It’s a cool app. I’m sure there’s [...]
February 6th, 2008 at 12:43 am
Congrats on getting the app done! I know its what a lot of us have been waiting for. I have aurora open 24/7 to show me my artwork
its awesome…
February 6th, 2008 at 5:06 am
Looks great, sad to see Front Row support go though. Also, I would like a “sound” option for an alarm, like Awaken. Sometimes I don’t want to use music.
One more thing… I can’t seem to be able to buy a license. It keeps asking me to enter my name and a valid email.
February 6th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Dylan: The lack of Front Row support has to do with the changes Apple made in Leopard’s Front Row – sadly there’s no way we can still integrate that.
February 6th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Sorry, no source, no donation (or pay).
February 6th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
It’s look like a cool app to me.
February 7th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Good program, I’ve used Aurora for a while now. I have a Macbook Pro 15″ / 2.0 Core Duo / 80 Gb HDD / 1 Gb DDR2 SDRAM.
Bug – In Aurora 4.0/136, when you wrap around a playlist after skipping through all of the songs, the first and last song of the playlist play simultaneously. When you subsequently press the stop button, last track of the playlist continues to play.
I’m also hoping that several lost features will be brought back soon. An option to repeat the playlist and the ability to modify the snooze time (e.g. cut it in half with every snooze) would be nice to have back.
Keep up the good work.
February 8th, 2008 at 5:07 am
i am just gonna keep my free version… sorry….not enough to make me want tobuy it
February 9th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
I like the product, but I would like to also play music to my Airport Express like in the previous version with iTunes. My computer is in the home office and remote speakers in the bedroom.
February 12th, 2008 at 5:15 am
I’ll have to agree with somebody. I really like the new interface, but the loss of the advanced snooze and volume fader features is just too much for me to buy it. If you add them back for 4.1, I will definitely buy it. As a side note on a feature I’d like to see, and I don’t know if it’s possible or not, but can you disable the iTunes support for the remote when the alarm is active? I’ve found myself hitting pause on the remote multiple times as I try to turn off the alarm as quickly as possible, and I end up pausing iTunes. Then alarm then fails to fire when the snooze is over. Anyway, thanks for all the work you’ve put into this. Very useful program. I hope I’ll be able to buy the next update.
February 12th, 2008 at 7:04 am
I tried this app some time ago, the free version i think, found that it did not suit my needs, because of my obsessively quiet macbook speakers. After deleting the app, I have found that i still have a menu icon that remains on my computer at startup every time. Really annoying since i cannot find it anywhere in the startup or menu libraries.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:42 am
SSUlli18: Simply choose “Disable menu item” from said menu item.
February 14th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Make it shareware, why not…
Make it leopard only… WHY?
I was using aurora freeware on my 10.4 system. I had to reinstall my system, but still using 10.4
So now.. I just can’t use aurora anymore, as the 10.4 version was simply removed.
Now that’s a fair move.. talk about progress !
February 16th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I really like Aurora, but it’ll take some time to find out if 4 is better than 3 or the alternatives… and I just started some weeks ago with it anyway.
The indepedence from iTunes is great. I’m not sure whether the great option to use a folder instead of single playlists is new.
[the original first sentence, not so linear]
The option for Fall Asleep after a certain number of tracks is wonderful, especially for podcasts.
I wonder if you could change from the -sorry, my general preference- silly up-down game to a (combined or single) number field.
The difference between 10 usual songs and 10 podcasts may be hours.
… … Oh, I just found out that I’d like to have it old-style. Mmh, by now that’s advantage Aurora 3.
Same for the volume fader.
I doubt there’s any relation between the loss of features and Leopard, sorry.
thyx
PS All’s coming back now: 2 weeks ago, I switched to Leopard but fully agree with NN. Actually, I thought about alternatives to Aurora 4 before buying Leopard.
PPS The v.3 “cut the snooze time” option should be great, I haven’t checked it yet.
Seriously, explicitly linking to the product page where the same “Leopard technologies” slogan is repeated is lame, sorry.
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Ookay, just bought it.
I hope you took my critique as objective.
So, looking forward to not depend on iTunes. Yes, that’s the decisive factor for me.
And thanks for including an educational discount! (the MacUpdatePromo was even cheaper)
thyx
PS at the moment, the site structure is really circular: with some tabs open, it took some time to understand that this here is the release notes mentioned on Aurora’s page.
March 13th, 2008 at 12:04 am
Aurora now in Shareware ? WTF ?
Donation ok, 5/6€ ok, but 15€ ? Oh !
Damn :/
March 21st, 2008 at 11:48 am
very nice web site. My English is not so good, so I do not understandt it well, but it seems very good. Thanks
April 4th, 2008 at 9:53 am
My main complaint with version 3 that I posted on Versiontracker is that I didn’t want it to put my computer to sleep, I just wanted it to stop the active process so other things could continue running (it kept halting my backups). I wouldn’t really have any other use for a new version. A snazzy interface doesn’t seem necessary on a sleep timer. I just want better sleep options.