DarkOwl

It’s often the case when you just want to sleep through the entire morning, or simply wake up too late and not arrive at important events. Luckily, you can completely rely on specialized applications like DarkOwl to notify you when it’s time to attend to specific meetings, or to help you get out of bed in the morning.

One of the main advantages is the lack of an installer, which makes it possible to have it carried around on a USB flash drive to always carry your predefined alarms wherever you go. Registry entries are not modified in the process, so the health status of the target PC remains intact. However, you must be sure that .NET Framework is on the target PC to ensure functionality.

A compact main window shows up on launch with clock showing system time, an editable text field to leave a message, and the currently playing song when an alarm is triggered. When not used, or you finished setting up alarms the application can quietly sit in the tray area and notify you in several ways.

Accessing the options panel is where all behavior and visual customization settings are found. On the one hand, you can choose to hide the application on minimize, stop the alarm when double clicking, and whether to load alarms from the last session. On the other hand, there are different color options to adjust, but there’s no palette to work with because colors need to be added by name.

The application can store multiple alarms for you. These are viewed and configured in a dedicated window. Needless to say that time needs to be configured, with additional options to include a message, icon, song, and whether or not to repeat until stopped.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that DarkOwl is a lightweight, practical little alarm clock you can customize with different color schemes, and make it alert you of various events through multiple alarms containing both messages, and audio alerts.