You may or may not have heard rumors about Apple implementing facial recognition into their OS for security purposes. This hasn’t happened yet, but likely will in the near future. I discovered an app over the holiday that will enable you to use this feature now.
It’s a free app available on the App Store called Should I Sleep? I should qualify that statement though — its most basic functionality is free. You can get upgrades for a few dollars.
The app checks the camera to see if someone is sitting in front of your machine just before it is going to go to sleep. If it detects a face, it doesn’t sleep. Some of the paid features include things like noise and motion detection. This can add security and convenience for those who use laptops.
Let’s say you have your system set to sleep after one minute, and you have your computer set to require a password to wake from sleep. You’re quietly sitting at your computer reading text on your screen. If you’re not physically interacting with your computer, it will go black and then you’ll have to enter your password every minute. With this app, the computer will know you’re in front of it and won’t sleep. If you get up to grab a steaming cup of liquid awesomeness (some call it coffee), your computer will realize you’re not there anymore and lock itself down. Many of you may think, “Well, why can’t you just move the mouse periodically?” Convenience!
Should I Sleep? doesn’t actually recognize your face, just a general face-like presence in front of the camera. So should someone jump in front of your machine in the seconds between when you get up and when it goes to sleep, it will halt the sleep process. It’s not a finicky app. We’ll have to wait for Apple to implement true facial recognition, which I’d bet we’d see in the next year or two.
I thought it was a neat app, and considering it’s essentially free, it’s worth downloading and toying around with. It’s not for everyone (especially the tin-foil hat wearers out there), but I’m sure more than a handful of you will find it useful.