Sleep Control Centre

I loved Caffeine. It was elegant. It was simple. Alas, it became unmaintained. This app is the logical successor. I like it enough to give it 4 stars. I didn’t give it 5 stars because it is overly complicated and as a result the User Experience can be a little confusing. Example: Anti-Sleep System vs. Anti-Sleep Display: My hypothesis is that most users will likely not care about the difference, or even make a differentiation in thier minds eye. Instead most users will think about on and off, is my computer on or off. As a result, having switches for system vs. display doesn’t really give me a good feel for what behavior is expected. Part of the challenge is that Macos doesn’t give users a great way to just “lock the screen” when they walk away, like is possible on Windows. It is, gasp, a Macos design flaw. Yes, I can hit Shft+Cmd+Q to lock the screen, but then what is the system behavior? The answer is nebulous beyond the fact that the screen is locked.

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i was stunned to find caffeine missing when i received my new imac and i downloaded antiSleep. now, everytime i wake my iMac, all my usb memory drives have their connections broken, and any applications tied to them crash. i futzed with its click down menu, but i can’t seem to tune it to stop causing my external memory devices from disconnecting such that the system is warning me that i am not closing them down correctly. this isn’t something i can sit down to four or five times a day. sorry. so, in my experience, the software is broken and unusable and i guess i’ll either have to pay for one or crack open the sdk and write one myself. but i will say, since 677 users find no problems with it, either i am missing something obvious, or i am the only one that keeps necessary data for an application on a usb link. worse, if the data on the disk were to be corrupted by this, i would be up the creek. so it isn’t even safe for me to use this software. maybe i set it up wrong, but i can’t seem to figure it out from the menu, and i’ve been using software since the early 1980s, and i don’t have the patience to contact them and work through it for what is really something they introduced in replacing caffeine. i don’t like slamming coders, because i was once one, and i’m sure they’re good people. they must be. they are not writing for microsoft :-)

I read some of the reviews and I can't disagree that for some people a lock screen button might be nice and an interface that works like their brains. I just turned it on and it kept my Mac awake during some long tasks that had quit because of sleep. Price seem reasonable. After using it for awhile I bought the pro family version to encourage the developer to keep going. As with all programs I have at times it is hard to understand all the options. As I said I turned it on and left my laptop doing something and it allowed the laptop to complete the multi-hour task. Tonight I am turning on some new features that let the screen sleep and even function while the lid is closed. As with all things I may come back in a week and the computer is still on and I forgot because the screen was off and the lid closed. people do dumb stuff like this. Overall a pretty good program at a pretty good price.

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The only function I need this app to do right is to keep my Macs from going to sleep. The app fails to perform this very basic function on 3 separate Macs. I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get it to work for over 6 months, on 3 different vintages of Macs; old to new, with different OS versions. I played along with several updates, thinking maybe they finally got it to work? The app installs and opens without issue, and offers a dizzying array of options to supposedly control its behavior, but it just doesn’t work. To pour salt in the wound, recent updates try to de-activate the already non-functional functions, trying to force an update to the “Pro” version. I really miss Caffeine. Its simple interface always worked as intended. The publishers of Anti-Sleep should focus on making their app work, period, rather than bloating it with features that few customers need. I really don’t appreciate the Photoshop complexity, I just need the app to keep my Macs from going to sleep. This app is a great big, bloated FAIL.

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I tried contacting developer via e-mail listed in the Help menu several times, with no response. I realize these are hard times and hope that the developer is okay. However, I figured I would write a review here and see if I get a response. Otherwise, while it worked at first several months ago (or at least I think it did - I rarely unplug my laptop), it now no longer works. As soon as you unplug, the indicator in the menu for don't sleep on lid close turns yellow, and sure enough, it sleeps when closing the lid. Even if the lid is already closed and still awake, if you then unplug, it will go to sleep. Worst of all - if you unplug, and plug back in, you're still not out of the woods; you have to quit Anti-Sleep, and restart it, otherwise it will sleep anyway when you next close the lid! As I need mission-critical network monitoring programs to continue running and alert me via sound at any time of day, this is not acceptable. I am a paying user and I am not sure if I even got four months of use out of it (because it is possible it never worked since December, 2019, since I only closed lid but did not unplug that whole time). I truly hope developer is a) okay and doing well, and b) has a way to fix this. I realize it may be due to Apple's updates, but as a paid product, hopefully it can be updated to work again flawlessly.