The tiny little free utility … is there anything better? Caffeine, not to be confused with the more expensive kind that works its magic on you, is one such utility that serves a single purpose: it prevents your Mac from “automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers.”

Launching Caffeine places a mini icon of a coffee cup in the menu bar:

Click on that tiny coffee cup and Caffeine is activated:

With that it will keep your Mac wide awake. I use this little tool a lot when doing renders or encodes, since I often move to the laptop or work on something elsewhere in the edit suite when the computer is churning away. Some of my computers, depending on the machine, will begin a screen saver or put the display to sleep sooner than others. Now I just activate Caffeine when I want to keep an eye on what’s happening. Caffeine has a preferences menu, which enable at login, as well as set different default durations:

There’s not really much more to be said about Caffeine as that’s about all it does. The developer, lighthead software, has seen fit to put Caffeine both on its website as a direct download as well as on the Mac App Store (App Store direct link). There are a lot of good reviews over there, too.

If only we editors could stay awake as easily.