Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"Smartphone-based alarm clocks have become increasingly sophisticated and featured-packed, and more and more people are ditching their old-school alarms for alarms of the app variety. Here are five of the most popular mobile alarm apps."

I do ok with the iOS Clock application with the built-in alarm function, but if you are looking for some other options LifeHacker has picked five of the most popular for you.

"Of all the eccentric Mac-lover accessories out there, these clocks might be some of the most phoned-in I've ever seen: they're basically just old Apple keyboards clawed out of an electronics dump with their keys shaken loose and stuffed with cheap horological guts."

Geekware makes some interesting products. You can check out the full line here.

"iPhone and now iPad Developers now have a more detailed way to see how app approvals are progressing. Apple added a clock a few weeks ago that displayed the percentage of apps approved within the last 14 days."

Any way that Apple can improve the developer aspect of the iTunes App Store is a good thing, but I'm not so sure how great this is for developers except in a general sort of way. The developers can see the percentage of new apps and updated apps that were approved within the last seven days, right now it stands at 98% and 99% respectively for them. Now if they made it so you could see how far along YOUR app was in the process that would be of greater benefit I would imagine. But kudos for Apple for improving the process in some fashion.