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

Or grab the notarized Amped.app from the latest release and drop it in /Applications. macOS 26 (Tahoe) or newer.

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 enable Keep Running While Locked, Amped offers to set the helper up. Approve "Amped" once under System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions, and from then on the lid toggle 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: enable Keep Running While Locked → Set Up Helper… → approve Amped in System Settings → toggle Keep Running While Locked 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.

For automated releases — push a v* tag and CI produces the notarized GitHub Release and bumps the Homebrew cask — see docs/RELEASING.md.

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