After a few months of hard work (mostly by Isaiah, as of lately), Caffeine for Linux has now reached adulthood with its 1.0 release! With this release, we finally feel like Caffeine is stable enough to be used on a day to day basis, and should fix most situations where the screensaver is being mischievous. It is our hope that this release will somehow make it into the official Ubuntu repositories, but of course maintainers of other distributions are more than welcome to include Caffeine in their repositories as well.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, Caffeine is a tiny little applet that sits in your system tray and uses magical caffeine to keep your computer from going asleep or activating the screensaver. This could be helpful when you’re giving presentations, playing full-screen games or when you’re watching flash videos.

So what’s new in 1.0?

One of the major complaints about how Caffeine used to work was that you manually had to click it to make it inhibit the screensaver. As you might imagine, this was very easy to forget when you just wanted to play some Frozen Bubble. With Caffeine 1.0, this is no longer a problem!

The one major feature that is introduced in 1.0 is automatic activating during user-defined conditions. My fellow Caffeine-developer, Brad, explains it very well:

There are a depressingly large number of fullscreen games available on Linux that don’t properly inhibit the screensaver. With Caffeine, you can fix this problem quite easily; no scripting required. It’s also handy for watching long flash videos without having to tap the Shift key every few minutes. In fact, the new 1.0 auto-activation features make these two things even easier than before.

There are three types of auto-activation that can be configured in the preferences:

You can configure Caffeine to automatically start preventing the screensaver and powersaving whenever a particular program is running. To set this up, just run the program that should inhibit the screensaver, right-click on the Caffeine applet, select “Preferences”, and then click “Add”. You should see a list of all running processes in the pop-up window. Click the name of the program that you started earlier and click “Add”. Close the preferences window. In about 30 seconds, you should see the coffee-cup applet spontaneously fill up.

If you want to set this up for a fullscreen application, just run the application, wait a minute or so and then quit. When you go into the Caffeine preferences to add a new auto-activation program, your fullscreen application should be listed under the “Recent Processes” tab.

Caffeine can also automatically prevent the screensaver and sleep mode when a flash video is playing in Firefox. This works for many popular flash video websites, most notably youtube.com. Unfortunately, there are also some websites for which this won’t work, like hulu.com (a workaround for this issue is available; see Isaiah’s post for details).

Finally, Caffeine can be configured to auto-activate whenever you play Quake Live, a version of Quake III that you can play for free right in your web browser.

Installation

If you have already installed Caffeine from our PPA, it should show up in your update manager and you can use that to update normally. If you haven’t installed Caffeine yet, but would like to do so, the easiest way is to do so via our PPA.

Instructions for this can be found on our Wiki.

What now?

While Caffeine is for the most part feature complete by now, there is one feature we really want to include. We want to be able to maintain an online database of applications that don’t properly inhibit the screensaver, and if the user chooses to, Caffeine should be able to automatically download a that database and use that to further enhance the auto-activation function. This quite far from finished at the moment, as there are plenty of risks involved in doing this, but it is something we’ve been working on.

What do you think?

If you have any ideas for how to make Caffeine better, please do head on over to our blueprints page and leave a comment there. You can of course also leave a comment here at the blog, and I will make sure it is discussed with the rest of the developers. Any bugs you encounter should be reported in our bug tracker, to make sure that it can be fixed as soon as possible.

For more information on Caffeine, head on over to our slightly outdated wiki, or go straight to our Launchpad project page.