Amped ⚊

A tiny, completely native macOS menu bar app that keeps your Mac awake — an Amphetamine-style alternative whose party trick is keeping the Mac awake with the lid closed, using pmset disablesleep rather than caffeinate alone.

No window, no settings sheet, no Dock icon. Just a pill in your menu bar and a handful of switches.

Install

Download Amped.app from the latest release, unzip it, and move it to /Applications. macOS 26 (Tahoe) or newer.

The build is not notarized. The first time you open it, right-click the app and choose Open.

Check for Updates looks at that releases page and, when a newer build exists, opens it so you can download and replace the app.

The menu

Click the pill in the menu bar:

The menu bar pill reflects the state at a glance:

• pill — sleep allowed (off)
• pill.fill — awake (lid open)
• pills.fill — awake with the lid closed

A status line shows the current state and battery level. ⌘Q quits.

On launch Amped starts with everything off (so it never surprises you by blocking sleep or prompting). Only the Auto-off preference is remembered. When it quits it always restores normal sleep behaviour.

How lid-closed mode stays passwordless

Keeping a Mac awake with the lid shut requires flipping the system disablesleep flag, which only root can do. Amped does this through a small privileged helper — a root LaunchDaemon embedded in the app bundle that the app talks to over XPC. The XPC channel is locked to Amped's own Developer-ID Team ID (setCodeSigningRequirement), so nothing but Amped's signed app can reach the helper, and the helper does exactly one thing: pmset disablesleep on/off.

The first time you choose Keep Awake but Lock the Screen or Keep Awake and Keep Screen Unlocked, Amped offers to set the helper up. Approve "Amped" once under System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions, and from then on that choice is silent — which also lets Auto-off at 20% drop clamshell mode while the lid is shut and you're away. Prefer not to? Just This Time keeps the Mac awake now with a single password prompt and installs nothing. Remove the helper anytime from that same System Settings pane (it's visible there, unlike a hidden sudoers rule); the setup offer reappears the next time you enable lid-closed mode.

The helper only runs in a properly signed build. In an unsigned local build it can't be approved, so lid mode falls back to a password prompt on every toggle. Build signed (below) to exercise the real path.

Build & run

Requires Xcode, plus two Homebrew tools:

Signed build (helper works)

Signing config lives in .env (git-ignored; copy from .env.example):

Then ./build.sh produces a build that meets Apple's notarization requirements: Developer ID signing, Hardened Runtime on both the app and the helper, a secure timestamp, and no get-task-allow entitlement. Install and try it:

Then: choose Keep Awake but Lock the Screen → Set Up Helper… → approve Amped in System Settings → choose it again — it's now silent. (No Team ID is hard-coded: the app reads its own at runtime to pin the XPC channel to the same team.)

Notarize & ship

One-time: create a notarytool keychain profile (the password is an app-specific password from appleid.apple.com, not your Apple ID password):

Set NOTARY_PROFILE=Amped in .env, then after a signed ./build.sh:

Distribute the stapled dist/Amped.app (zip or DMG). altool is dead since Nov 2023 — this uses notarytool.

Pushing to main publishes an unsigned GitHub Release. See docs/RELEASING.md. Notarization is separate, and it is not part of that release yet.

To work on it in Xcode:

(The .xcodeproj is generated from project.yml and is git-ignored.)

The icon

• Menu bar: an SF Symbol (pill family) — Apple permits SF Symbols in your own UI, and they adapt to light/dark and the focus state automatically.
• App icon: icon/amped.svg (a two-tone capsule). icon/generate-icons.sh renders it into the asset catalog at all macOS sizes. To make a proper Liquid Glass icon, open amped.svg in Icon Composer, refine the layers, and export an .icon to drop into the project.

A note on the App Store

The lid-closed feature relies on pmset disablesleep / a privileged helper, which a sandboxed App Store build cannot do. Ship it as a notarized Developer ID app. An App Store version would have to drop the clamshell feature.

Project layout