There are a ton of alarm clock applications out there for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but they usually only do one thing, wake you up. Glance is an application that combines an alarm clock, weather and news feed into one beautiful and highly customizable interface.

The first thing you’ll notice about Glance is how nice everything looks. Everything is laid out just right, with the time centered in large print and the scrolling news feed at the very bottom. The weather includes your location name, temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius, and an icon to display what the weather is like outside. Each of these features is fully customizable, including options for layout and colors. Each part of the app can be a different color, so you can really go nuts with design.

The top of the screen includes three buttons: settings, dimmer and alarm toggle. Tapping on these buttons emits a gentle “click” sound, which gives you some nice feedback when selecting items. There are quite a few options to choose from in the settings menu. You can choose to keep the phone from sleeping while the app is running, change the alarm settings, snooze length, temperature format and which news feed to display. The news feed has twenty-five options to choose from, including technology sites like Gizmodo, Apple and iLounge. There are also feeds for entertainment, sports and news. The selection of feeds is great, but you’ll probably wish you had the option to enter in your own URL for a news feed not listed. Wouldn’t it be nice to see your Twitter or Facebook feed as well? Hopefully this option will come in the next update. While the news scrolls across the bottom of the screen, if you see something that interests you, you can double tap on it to open the article in safari. The only downside here is it will quit the app to get there. It would be nice to include an in-app browser.

There are also nine sounds to choose from for the alarm clock. More choices would be nice, but the best thing this developer could do is to allow the user to pick a song from the iPod to wake up to. This would add some value to an already great application. Also, in case you use this app bedside and your significant other doesn’t appreciate the brightness, Glance includes a dimmer button with two levels darker than the default brightness setting.

One other thing lacking from this app is the ability to set multiple alarms. I always like to set one alarm to go off Monday through Friday for work and a second alarm for weekends. Other than that, Glance really is a great application. With the addition of a social networking feed, this app could really be a great thing to have sitting in a dock on your desk at work. It has a ton of potential and I strongly recommend checking it out.