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Caffeine is a very simple application that keeps your Mac from going to sleep or having the screensaver come on. This can be very useful in many situations. For example, it can be used if you are a student taking notes during a long class and don’t want your Mac going to sleep because of inactivity or perhaps you are at work and need to constantly have your Mac running during a meeting. What’s really great about Caffeine is that it functions completely unobtrusively. When the application is installed, all that shows is an icon in your menu bar. It is using this icon that you can activate and deactivate the service, all without interrupting what you are currently working on.
While Caffeine does one thing very well, it falls short on a couple issues. The first one is pretty obvious. Always having your Mac awake will absolutely destroy your battery. This, of course, can be solved by using your charger, but some people won’t always be in positions where that will be practical. The major thing that Caffeine misses is that it only works when your Macbook is open (when the lid is open). This makes absolutely no sense because only working when the Macbook is open ignores the most useful purpose of an application like this — closing your Macbook but keeping it still running. A terrific feature would be if Caffeine allowed you to simply close your computer (close the lid) and still have an active internet connection or whatever else you wanted saved.
If you don’t mind your battery draining faster and you can get over the fact that this program doesn’t work while your Macbook is closed, then this application is a good fit. However, it seems that because Caffeine lacks such a useful feature, it really limits the number of potential users. If Caffeine were to add that one feature, then this application would be absolutely perfect. But until then, Caffeine will remain incomplete and much less useful.
Price: Free
Version discovered: 1.1.1
Supported OS: OS X 10.6 or later
Download size: 1mb
