The first thing you'll notice about Melatonin is that it's , with graphics that look something like a mural you might paint on a nursery wall and theme choices of a yellow birdy, a penguin, or a crab on the beach. This gentle, soothing motif is the cornerstone of the app, which aims to wake its user up gradually. Unfortunately, these features don't outweigh the amount of work required to use Melatonin.

After you launch the app, simply click on the window shade to adjust the settings. You program a wake-up time, whether you'd like the app to play theme sounds or music to wake you, and how many minutes before your alarm you'd like "sunrise" to occur. You also program your "sleep" preferences, meaning you select a bedtime soundtrack and how many minutes you'd like to it to play during "sunset."

In the morning, you can tap the screen to snooze or shake the phone to turn the alarm off. The shake feature is particularly appealing, as my "slide to unlock" aim is not so great first thing in the morning.

Now, both the sunrise and sunset functions are novel, but not entirely useful. Sunrise basically means that the app turns on and slowly lights up more and more before your animated little friend starts playing music. Again, a great idea, but unless you sleep with your iPhone in your face in a completely pitch-black room, it's not likely that you'll ever notice the lights coming on.

The sunset function is equally superfluous. After you've set your wake-up time, you tap your bird (or penguin, or crab) to signal that you're going to sleep. The lights gradually come down, and soft music plays to lull you to sleep. You can tap the screen again to skip sunset, which I did, because I don't enjoy the sound quality of the iPhone's speakers enough to listen to it as I fall asleep. This isn't to say that the option isn't a cool idea--just that it's not essential to the experience.