UnPlugged 4+

I love this app. I wanted something that stays hidden and reliably alerts me if I accidentally unplug the laptop. That’s all. Simple.

UnPlugged’s preferences settings allow you to be notified using either Apple’s system-wide Notifications method or via Unplugged’s own built-in method (shown in the third and fourth screen shots, above). The beauty of the built-in notification method is it doesn’t automatically disappear after so many seconds like Notifications do; the alert stays there until you acknowledge it with a click, which is great, because unplugging often occurs when one is moving the laptop and isn’t watching the screen for a fleeting notification.

It also allows you to not have its icon show in the menu bar. Thus, the app can be made to run completely transparently in the background so it only gets in your face when it needs to. And when it *does* get in your face to tell you your laptop’s been unplugged, you just click to acknowledge and it can be set to leave you alone as you work off of the battery.

Finally, if you *were* plugged in, put the laptop to sleep (or close the lid), the laptop becomes unplugged, and you then wake the laptop, UnPlugged doesn’t fail; it still alerts you.

Great app to maximize battery life. It offers great granular controls for battery level notifications and can exclude certain applications (when watching movies or giving presentations, for example). Most importantly, it is rock-solid and has worked consistently. I use it to make sure my laptop battery is only used for shallow discharges, and it has definitely maximized my battery life (monitor historical battery life with Coconut Battery, another fantastic app which is a perfect complement to this one). Thank you to the Unplugged developer for a great little app!

This app has one narrow purpose, and it does that well. It is an app that anyone who wants to have visual cues of their laptop's battery states should install. With Notification Center set up to not collect the notifications from this app you can see the battery state as it drains (and if desired charges) in the same fashion as email, iMessage, and the like, but not have that pollute your Notification Center.