Over the years I’ve installed a lot of commercial software, shareware and freeware on my Macs. I love trying new apps. That being said, most of what I install gets used once or twice, then discarded. A few days ago, I shared the first group of apps I use regularly. Today I have another collection of applications and utilities I use on a regular basis.The applications listed below contains some names you’ll probably be familiar with, but there’s a reason for that. They’re just superb at what they do, thus very popular.
Caffeine
If you work on a MacBook Pro, you no doubt have your LCD screen set to dim and turn off after a relatively short amount of inactivity in order to save battery charge. This is generally fine unless you’re doing a lot of reading or watching a DVD. Caffeine is a small application that lives in your menubar that solves this problem by preventing your screen from dimming and the computer from sleeping. A click of the coffee cup icon in the menubar prevents your computer from sleeping for a user-specified amount of time ranging from 15 minutes to 5 hours (or indefinitely). Caffeine is a free utility.
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If you work on a MacBook or MacBook Pro you probably have the laptop set to sleep after a certain amount of time, and the screen to dim after a certain period of inactivity, in order to save battery life. The problem is that sometimes the dimming or sleep feature activates at an inopportune time – such as reading long documents or Web pages. You could adjust your EnergySaver preference settings, but that’s a pain – and if you forget to switch it back, your battery drains even faster. Enter 
Caffeine is easily activated by clicking the menubar icon. Another click deactivates it. You can also tell Caffeine to turn off after a specified number of minutes by Command + clicking on the icon. A checkbox in the preferences sets Caffeine as a startup application, so it’s always there when you need it. I recently started using Caffeine on my MacBook Pro and love it. It’s a one-trick pony, but it does the trick very well.