Morning

Have you ever wanted to wake up like Tony Stark? Well, I can't help you with the girl, but I can help with the alarm clock. After seeing the movie, I decided that I too would prefer pleasing music and Jarvis' voice to the Klaxon that most people wake up to now. So, I set about designing 'Morning'.

What It Does

Morning wakes you up with a selected iTunes playlist and tells you the current time, weather, weather forecast, and (if you want), stock prices, current headlines, and snow conditions. It also turns on your computer screen and uses the Mac OS X RSS Visualizer screensaver to give you the current news headlines.

How it Works

Morning is Mac only... sorry Windows. The program (depending on your installation), uses either cron and a series of shell scripts, or automator and Mac OS X's launchd. The text is generated server-side and sent to your system's text-to-speech generator, which means you can configure voices and speaking rates.

I'll soon post a full tutorial on getting it up and running on your system, but for those of you a little more technically inclined, I'll leave you with this for now:

http://arasian.com/morning/?offset=timeoffset&zip=yourzipcode
Where the time offset is the number of hours away from PST (where the server's located), and the zip grabs local weather and whatnot.

Full UNIX tutorial to come, but I'll get you started:
wget -q0 - http://www.arasian.com/morning?offset=0&zip=00000 | say