Review: Power Manager 4.0
- Article 15 of 19
- MacUser, August 2010
Everyone’s environmentally friendly these days. Switching off your Mac when you don’t need it can save you money – and help the planet – in the long run. Although OS X has a built-in Energy Saver preference pane that allows you to schedule sleeps, shutdowns and start-ups, it lacks fine control. Power Manager is designed to fill that gap by offering you the chance to schedule one-off and regular activities. Want to have your Mac turn on for a few hours in the morning before you get up for work, then shutdown after you leave – but only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays? Well, you can schedule that and combine schedules to create entirely individual settings for particular days.
Running as a system preference and a menubar item, Power Manager includes in version 4.0 a setup assistant with preset templates for a variety of uses. Some of the templates are a little inflexible, offering in the work/school template for example only two hours of boot-up time before you want to use your Mac. However, once you’ve created a schedule, you have complete flexibility in editing it, changing schedules, and adding new events, including one-off occurrences.
Shutdown and sleep options provided by Power Manager are more powerful than OS X’s, able to force an application to quit if it’s stopping the Mac from doing as it’s told. Although the developers say the software should be smart enough not to interrupt you if you’re watching videos, we found that this didn’t apply to iTunes at least.
As well as being able to start up your Mac, shut it down and put it to sleep, Power Manager gives you other event options. You can force users to log out or require a password to log back in again. New to version 4.0 are the abilities to cause events to happen as the result of different triggers, to run applications or scripts at specific times, and to put the Mac to sleep for defined periods of time. You can also cause events to occur if the Mac or the current user has been inactive for a set period of time.
Power Manager’s interface is slightly schizophrenic: the System Preferences pane does a good job of providing management functions and the setup assistant is very easy to use, but you’ll need the menubar item to list events in the order they’ll occur. As a result, visualising schedules is harder than it should be – it’s relatively easy to set up a new schedule for weekdays and mess up the switch to and from weekends, for example.
For power users, there is a range of automation tools. There’s a command line tool, a comprehensive AppleScript dictionary and Automator actions for constructing workflows, as well as the option to mirror folders to other destinations. Remote management over an SSL connection is possible using the separate £299.95 Power Manager Professional, which can also install software and manage whole banks of Macs.
In terms of being able to manage the energy demands of your Mac, Power Manager has very few flaws and limitations, with Energy Saver filling in the few blanks. Where Dragon Software have missed a trick is on pricing: £39.95 is simply too much for a home user who might only be able to get back that money in a year or two, depending on usage. By stripping out the automation and mirroring functions, a Power Manager Lite available for £10-15 would be an easier sell. As it is, Power Manager is too expensive for the home user.
Nevertheless, for a professional organisation that needs to manage its Macs’ uptimes, Power Manager is an excellent tool and well worth investing in.