MacOS App of the Week: Amphetamine
Go ahead and get rid of your Breaking Bad jokes. Will wait. Once you’re done, we recommend installing Amphetamine as soon as possible. This application is very small to download and it is like giving your macOS computer acaffeinated pill . Upon activation, your system will stop going to sleep.
“But wait,” you ask. Why don’t I want my MacBook to go to sleep? This saves battery power. “
Yes! Absolutely. A sleepy Mac is usually a great thing. You should do your best to ensure that your system does not waste resources when it does nothing for hours. If you are running on battery power, you should definitely make sure that your system uses as little power as possible when you are not sitting in front of it and typing.
However, there are many cases where you do not want your system to go to sleep, especially if your screen saver or display off settings are set to a very low value. For example, suppose you are lugging your laptop to a meeting. It will be frustrating to authenticate to your system every time you want to check your notes if your “require password” settings are strict for a sleeping MacBook. Even if it isn’t, working with the sleeping screen on and off all the time can be annoying as well.
Or suppose you want your company Slack to stay open while you sit at lunch, so you can watch a scroll through everything that happens while you eat. With Amphetamine, you just have to click on one icon in the macOS menu bar to keep your system awake forever.
You can also configure the app so that clicking on its icon – I like a full / empty coffee cup – will only activate the amphetamine for a specified amount of time.
If you tend to go to meetings that last an hour ( or less ), Amphetamine may turn off automatically after a certain amount of time. You can also configure it so that Amphetamine only starts up when it notices that a certain app is running, when you are connected to a certain wireless network, for a set period of time (your favorite lunch meeting), or whenever your system’s battery is running. life above a certain threshold (or charging).
You can use amphetamine with hotkeys, you can configure it to fire the screensaver without putting the system to sleep, and you can even get notifications at regular intervals while you are awake. The app gives you tons of options to customize its functionality in the craziest ways, and we appreciate its thoroughness. I use amphetamine almost daily and I am very glad that I was hooked.
( Bonus: if you’re just not ready to switch entirely to amphetamine just yet and prefer a milder, less functional drug for your system, check out KeepingYouAwake , an open source alternative to amphetamine’s predecessor, caffeine.)
Do you have a Mac app (paid or free) that you really like? Tell us about it: [email protected] .