One of the things I love most about being a Mac is that there never seems to be an end to cool little apps and widgets that Mac developers come up with to make your Mac even more awesome. As a slide designer who often uses my Mac to host presentations during important meetings and things, Caffeine is now one application that I can’t imagine having to live without.

Has this ever happened to you? You’re giving a presentation in front of a huge room of important people, you spend a few minutes on a particular slide and all of a sudden, the screensaver comes on, distracting your audience and forcing you to authenticate to unlock the computer and get back to your presentation. Maybe it’s happened to you while you were teaching a class or preaching a sermon, but no matter what, it’s always a pain. The only solution is to spend several minutes remembering to turn off your screensavers and sleep settings before the presentation starts. If you give lots of presentations, this can be really frustrating. Thankfully the folks at Lighthead decided to put a stop to this.

Caffeine is a simple, freeware application that lets you turn your screensavers and sleep settings off and on in just one click. It adds a little coffee cup icon (clever) to your menu bar that you can toggle on and off. When the cup is full, caffeine is on and your screensavers and such are turned off until further notice. Whenever your presentation is finished, just click the cup again and caffeine lets your screensavers go back to their original settings. You can even set it to run for a certain amount of time so there’s no chance of you forgetting to turn it back off again.

When the cup is full, caffeine is on and your screensavers and such are turned off until further notice.

Caffeine isn’t just great for running presentations.  It’s also good to use while watching long videos on YouTube or Hulu, or for reading long blog posts…anything you do regularly during which screensavers are a hassle. I’ve been using it for several months now and love it. It was one of the first things I installed when I got my new Mac recently.

P.S. – I don’t know of anything like this for PC, but if some you do, do share. If not, PC developers, here’s a great idea…