niacin 1.0 is here
Today we’re shipping niacin 1.0 — the first stable release of a tiny menu bar utility for keeping your Mac awake. It’s free, open source under the MIT licence, and built from the ground up for the way IT teams actually deploy software.
What we built
niacin is a thin Swift wrapper around caffeinate, the sleep-prevention tool Apple already ships with macOS. It lives in the menu bar with no Dock icon, no daemons, and no kernel extensions. You pick a duration — 5 minutes, an hour, until you say so — and your Mac stays awake. That’s the whole product.
What sets it apart is what happens around it: every behaviour can be locked and enforced by IT through a single managed preferences plist, deployable through JAMF, Mosyle, Kandji, Intune, or any MDM that pushes preference domains. Locked settings show a lock icon in the UI, and a “Managed by Organisation” section makes every active policy visible to the user.
Why we built it
Most stay-awake apps for macOS were written for a single user on a personal machine. They work, but they’re a headache to deploy in a managed fleet: opaque settings, surprising defaults, no way for IT to draw a line. The other end of the spectrum is the bare caffeinate command in Terminal — perfectly capable, but not exactly something you can hand to a non-technical employee.
niacin sits between the two. End users get a friendly menu bar app that does one thing well. IT gets a documented MDM surface that lets them set sensible policy — for example, “allow stay-awake for up to two hours, but never disable the lock screen” — without ever touching a user’s machine.
What’s in 1.0
- Menu bar app with timed and indefinite activations
- Three modes: full awake, allow screen to sleep, prevent device from locking
- Full MDM support via the
com.oldsalt.niacinpreference domain - Lock indicators on every IT-controlled setting
- No analytics, no telemetry, no network requests
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later
Where to get it
Source is on GitHub at github.com/just-an-oldsalt/niacin, and the Mac App Store release is in review. Bug reports, MDM key requests, and pull requests are all welcome — file them on the issue tracker or email niacin@dort.zone.
Thanks for trying it.