AppFlow

Quick app review today, but one that I believe is worthy of a review, for the simple reason that I can’t live without it!

The modern Mac can be used as so much more than just a computer. It may be your media center, used for playing music, watching films etc. It can even be used for watching television on demand or even live using brilliant services such as the BBC iPlayer. This is all very well, but what happens when you start to watch streamed media over the internet? Yep, the screen blanks and the computer goes to sleep -annoying at best!

Caffeine?

The old saying applies – “There’s an App for that!”. Caffeine is a neat little menu bar application that allows you to give your computer a cup of coffee, thereby stopping it from falling asleep while you’re watching a movie.

The interface it’self is remarkably simple consists of a little coffee cup. When the cup is empty – computer can go to sleep. When the cup is full, and steaming – computer is on a caffeine high and won’t sleep at all! Switching between the cups is done with a click.

A flavour for all

You wouldn’t think that such a basic app would need a preferences panel, but here it is!

The most useful setting here is the caffeine’s duration. Setting this from 5 minutes to 5 hours allows you to control the default time before the computer will return to it’s normal sleep pattern. This is very useful for the more forgetful people (myself included) who may leave caffeine on while leaving the computer – not good for the environment, or it’s battery life!

Conclusion

Caffeine is a small, menu bar application that can prove extremely useful when leaving your computer and not wanting it to go to sleep. It’s simple, small and a generally all-round good app. It has no special features, but what else could you possibly need!

Caffeine is completely free and available for download for OS X 10.5-10.6 (10.4 version available). From Lighthead Software.