Caffeine - Free Coffee Mac App to Keep Your Macbook Awake

Are you getting tired of your Mac or Macbook laptop falling asleep all the time?  Does your Mac nod off just when you need it?  There is a simple cure for your sleeply laptop, give your Macbook a daily dose of caffeine.  Now, before you get excited and start pouingr a steaming mug of your favourite ground coffee all over the keyboard of your Macbook, it’s not that sort of caffeine.  A mug of coffee will actually put your laptop to sleep forever.

Caffeine is a simple application designed to keep your Mac or Macbook awake all the time without slipping into sleepy time mode, usually at just the wrong moment.  Caffeine will stop your Mac from going to sleep, dimming the screen or activating the screen saver.   This tiny programme, which is totally free to download, is probably out of all the many thousand apps available, the most useful and the one you will use time and time again on a daily basis. 

Once downloaded, Caffeine puts an icon in the right hand side of your menu bar, and the icon is simply an empty coffee cup.  To stop your Mac from dropping off into the land of nod, just simply click on the Caffeine icon and the empty coffee cup will change to a full cup of steaming hot coffee.  Now, your Mac is forced to stay awake as long as you wish or when you turn off your computer. 

It’s very simple, very effective, and really useful if you don’t want to keep waking up your Mac or Macbook just because you were busy off the computer doing the likes of a spot of research, talking on the phone or just relaxing for a few minutes with a real cup of coffee.

Caffeine is really useful when you are doing large downloads and when you are re-calibrating your monitor with a monitor calibrator device. You need the screen to be on all the way through the calibrating process which can take several minutes to complete.     

Its simple, hassle free, easy to install and totally fool proof to operate.  The only requirements is that you are running Mac OS X 10.6 or later.  There is an earlier version currently available for Tiger 10.4 too.  Again, Caffeine is totally free freeware and only takes up 254 kb of space.  It is available to download from your new App Store on your Mac today or from here: http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine  

Highly recommended - give your Mac a Caffeine kick today.

Also while you have your screen permanently on, another free little gadget will help your eyes, while you are spending all those hours looking at the screen. F.lux is a little app that gives better lighting to your Mac. Do you find that you are blinded by the bright white glow of your screen in the evenings, which is rather harsh and quite tiring on those eyes. Well, F.lux could be the answer, especially if you are a writer staring at the screen for hours while you are hammering out your latest masterpiece.

This gadget is again totally free freeware and sits on the right hand side of your menu bar. What it does is adjust the lighting on the screen to a warm glow once the sun goes down. You tell it your location and it will turn its self on at sunset, and off again at sunrise. 

You adjust the settings to the type of lighting you use in your room such as tungsten, fluorescent and halogen. It can be manually turned off for an hour if required, so you can view pictures in normal screen light for example.

Again F.Lux is simple to install, easy to operate, and is available for Mac, Linux and Windows too. It’s only available direct from here: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

Highly recommended - give your eyes a bit of a rest in the evenings.

Download and install these two very simple and small apps today - they will make a difference to your Mac and your wellbeing.

© David Lloyd-Jones 2010