Caffeine and InsomiaX

Have you ever been watching a Youtube or Google video, and your computer screen dims, or goes into screen saver mode. Well this happens because your computer doesn’t think you’re doing anything, so it wants to do what you’ve asked it to do (assuming you have the screen saver option activated). Well there is an application that is quick and easy to use, and it just sits in your menu bar. When you are watching a video on your laptop you can click the icon to activate the application, and what it does is prevents your computer from going into screen saver mode. The application is called Caffeine. And it’s free

Caffeine
Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.

InsomniaX
Another application that I’ve found useful, in a sort of different kind of situation is InsomniaX. When I’m downloading or converting large files, for example encoding video, I sometimes want to leave my laptop running, but I would like to close the lid. Now, as you probably know if you own a laptop, closing the lid generally puts your laptop to sleep, and this is function that is good, and comes in handy…except in these circumstances. What InsomniaX does is prevents your laptop from going to sleep when you close the lid. When the program is loaded it sits in the menu bar, and you can enable or disable it easily with it’s drop down menu. Best part is, if you are using a newer MacBook or MacBook Pro, they are able to run in clamshell mode, which means you can run them with the lids closed with external monitors. What this means is that using this program, according to the developer, should not overheat your computer, and it does turn off your laptop screen when you close the lid. Go to the developers website and read the comments and decide for yourself. I personally use this program ALL the time, and I’ve never had any trouble. I currently use a Black MacBook, Intel Core 2 Duo. I have yet to see whether or not Caffeine does the same as InsomniaX. It seems that the developers target different usages with their websites, however I will test this tomorrow, and edit this post. Oh yeah, best of all they’re both free.