Sandman For Mac

Working late into the night is almost a given these days for passionate developers or for those of us that use a computer to earn a living. Combined with an awkward sleeping time, this will most probably mean that your sleep's quality will take a big hit.

To avoid it, you can use a website like sleepyti.me to determine the right time to go to sleep or Insomnia, an app inspired by sleepyti.me and designed from the ground up to notify you when you need to go to bed.

Sandman (formerly Insomnia) is an Electron-based cross-platform application designed to run on the most popular operating systems (i.e. macOS, Windows, and Linux) which will make sure that you get a restful sleep and have a productive day, each day, every day.

Moreover, Sandman uses an algorithm created to automatically calculate the perfect time to fall asleep based on a pre-defined wake-up time.

To do that it uses a sleeping cycle of 90 minutes, which, according to some sleep experts, is the exact time needed by the human body to go through all sleep phases, down to REM sleep required to get a good rest.

Sandman will also notify you automatically if your computer's uptime extends beyond 12 hours, to help you stay productive and efficient by avoiding overworking.

Upon launch, Sandman will require you to enter your wake-up time, and it will calculate six sleeping times based on it. Afterward, you can minimize the app, and it will run in the background, alerting you when an optimal bedtime approaches.

Even though Sandman still misses some features that would add to its helpfulness, such as a removable dock icon, the possibility to change the background color and the possibility to set it to start on login, it still is a fully functional and quite useful app.

On the whole, having Sandman running in the background on your Mac is an excellent idea if you find yourself forgetting to go to sleep and working through the night right until your wake-up time.