Sleep Control Centre 4+

Logical successor to Caffeine

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.

I miss caffeine. i can’t use this

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 :-)

Developer Response ,

I sincerely regret that the application did not like you. Try the new version, it is much more stable and has more powerful functionality, including work with external devices. If you need additional features, please write to me at support@3bitlab.com

I donow?. It works for me

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.