Inside Awake: Three Tools Behind One Menu Bar Cup
Awake is a small Mac utility from 1dot1 that lives behind a cup icon in the menu bar. It does three jobs: it keeps the Mac from sleeping, it hides the desktop, and it dims everything except the window in use. This teardown walks through the app screen by screen, in the order you meet it, and explains why each part is built the way it is.
Two of the images below are illustrations of what a feature does on screen rather than captures of a real desktop, and their descriptions say so. Everything else is the app's own interface.
One panel for three tools
Clicking the cup opens a single panel instead of a long menu. Three round buttons sit side by side, one per feature, each with its name, its current state and its keyboard shortcut underneath. A button turns solid when its feature is on. Below them are Settings, About and Quit, the three things every menu bar app is expected to have.
The panel exists because a list of menu items hides state. With buttons, you can see at a glance whether the Mac is being kept awake, and for how long, without reading a word. It also puts each feature one click away, which matters for something you might switch on and off several times a day.
A countdown you can read at a glance
Keep Awake can run indefinitely or for a set time. Right-clicking its button opens a list of durations, from one minute up to eight hours, grouped into short and long blocks. Choose one and a thin ring appears around the button, emptying as the time runs down, while the label underneath counts the minutes and seconds left. When the time is up, the Mac is free to sleep again.
Durations sit behind a right-click on purpose. Most people never change the default, so a plain click should do the common thing immediately. The list is there for the moments that need it, such as keeping a Mac awake for exactly one long download and then letting it sleep on its own.
Keep Awake settings
The Keep Awake tab sets what a plain click does. A stepped slider picks the default duration, ending at Infinite. Suppress Screensaver keeps the display on and the screensaver away while the feature runs. Disable on Low Battery switches Keep Awake off by itself when a laptop on battery power drops below a threshold you set, anywhere from 5 to 50 percent.
The battery rule is on out of the box. Keeping a Mac awake is useful right up until it drains a laptop that was meant to last the afternoon, so the safe choice ships switched on. The Trigger section at the bottom assigns a global keyboard shortcut and can turn the feature on every time the app launches.
Hide Desktop
Hide Desktop covers the files and folders on the desktop with a plain surface in one click. It is meant for the minutes before a screen share, a recording or a presentation, when a desktop full of downloads and old screenshots is the last thing an audience should see. The files themselves never move. Switching the feature off shows the desktop exactly as it was.
The cover sits just above the desktop icons and below every app window, so the apps being presented stay in front and fully usable. It also follows the display setup, covering each connected screen, and rebuilds itself when a screen is plugged in or removed.
Hide Desktop settings
The cover can be the current wallpaper, any image you pick, or a solid colour. Wallpaper is the default because it looks as though nothing changed, which is usually the point. A Cover Widgets switch decides whether desktop widgets disappear along with the icons or stay visible.
Like every feature in the app, Hide Desktop gets its own keyboard shortcut and can switch itself on at launch. Someone who presents every day can make a clean desktop the normal state and forget about it.
Focus Dim
Focus Dim darkens everything behind the window you are working in. The active window stays at full brightness while other windows and the desktop fade back, and the effect follows focus: click another window and the dimming moves with it. Clicks still pass through the dimmed area, so switching windows works the way it always has.
It is built for long stretches of reading and writing on a busy screen, where the eye keeps catching movement in a chat window or a feed. Dimming rather than hiding keeps everything within reach while making it quieter.
Focus Dim settings
Mode chooses between focusing the active window or the whole active app, which suits apps that spread their work across several windows. Opacity is set with a rotary knob and starts at 30 percent. The colour of the dim can be anything, and it starts as black.
A knob was chosen over a slider because opacity is a setting people judge by feel, not a number they aim for. Turning it while the feature is on shows the result immediately.
General settings and Quick Toggle
The General tab covers the app itself: launching at login, sound effects when a feature switches on or off, and which of three icons appears in the menu bar. Quick Toggle is the part worth knowing about. It lets a right-click on the menu bar icon switch a chosen set of features on or off without opening the panel. The trigger can move to the left click instead, or be turned off.
Quick Toggle exists for people who use one feature far more than the others. If Keep Awake is the only thing you ever reach for, a right-click becomes the whole interface.
A shortcut for everything
Each feature can have its own global keyboard shortcut, recorded by pressing the keys you want in the settings window. Keep Awake comes set to Control-Shift-T. Shortcuts work from any app and need no extra system permissions.
A new shortcut must include Control, Option or Command, so it can never swallow a letter you meant to type. Escape cancels a recording, and a small cross removes a shortcut entirely.
Built in black and white
Everything in Awake is greyscale, in light and dark mode. On states are solid black or white, switches and sliders are neutral grey, and even the settings tabs are drawn by the app so they never pick up the system accent colour. The only colour on screen is whatever you choose for Hide Desktop or Focus Dim.
A menu bar utility sits next to the system's own icons all day, and the less it asks for attention, the better it does its job. Awake is a universal app for Apple silicon and Intel Macs, runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, and never connects to the internet.
Other ways to keep a Mac awake, and where Awake fits
macOS already has ways to stay awake. The Displays, Lock Screen and Battery settings in System Settings change when the Mac sleeps, but the change stays until someone remembers to undo it. The caffeinate command in Terminal, for example caffeinate -t 3600, keeps the Mac from sleeping for an hour, but it needs a Terminal window and shows no countdown.
Awake uses the same macOS power controls behind a single button: a set time or indefinitely, a countdown ring, a keyboard shortcut and a stop when the battery runs low. One limit applies to every method: closing a MacBook lid still puts it to sleep unless it is connected to power and an external display.
Get Awake
Awake is available on 1dot1 as a single download, with a README and the licence inside the zip.