Caffeine For Mac

Caffeine is an unobtrusive status bar menu application designed to help you make sure your Mac remains active for a certain period of time. This is very useful if you need to prevent the action of your screensaver, or of the energy saver tool, without manually changing your settings.

Upon launch, Caffeine will place a small menulet in your status bar, and you can activate the app functionalities with a simple mouse click. Note that via the Preferences window you can setup the default time period used by Caffeine: indefinite, 5/10/15/30 minutes, or 1/2/5 hours.

You can manually select the time period by right clicking on the Caffeine status bar icon, and manually selecting the appropriate entry from the list. Other customization options include the possibility to start the application at login, or when you power on your computer.

If you want to watch a movie, to run a presentation, or to perform any action that does not require active user involvement on your Mac, your energy saving settings might interfere with your goal: the computer might go to sleep, the screen might dim down, or you screen saver might become active after a certain period of time.

Of course, you can deactivate these settings, but manually dealing with the task takes time, and you might simply forget about at least one of them.

Caffeine is a small Mac app that can help you deal with this issue but keeping your Mac’s screen active for as long as you like. However, keep in mind that this might lead to overheating, so make sure to promptly deactivate the app when you are done.