Do you own a Mac, either for business or personal use? Do you share your living space and find yourself wondering if people are trying to access your Mac and, maybe guess the password – if you have one set up – for entry without you actually knowing? Maybe you have an untrusting spouse who you think is trying to snoop on what’s inside your computer, or maybe you just like to retain total control over your gadgets and want to know exactly what’s going on. Regardless of the use case or the reasons behind it, you can make use of a great little utility called Blink, which affords Mac owners with an iPhone or iPad the ability to see exactly when their Mac is woken up.
Blink is a simple little utility that provides a notification alert directly on the connected iPhone or iPad whenever a Mac is woken from sleep, or conversely, whenever it is put back to sleep. The way this works is that a dedicated Blink app for Mac is downloaded and installed on the Mac from the Mac App Store, while a companion app costing $0.99 is installed on a connected iPhone or iPad from the iOS App Store.
The two devices then need to be connected and paired via Bluetooth Low Energy, meaning that this whole cycle only works with iPhones and Macs that support Bluetooth LE. Once that initial pairing has been processed, there’s no requirement to have the devices local to one another or in Bluetooth range.
Living up with the time, Blink also supports Apple’s “most personal device ever”, which means notifications pushed to your iPhone will also be pushed directly to that Apple Watch on your wrist, keeping you abreast of your Mac’s state every second. This is a great little move considering that we even tend to leave our iPhones unattended, especially in a home environment.
Blink definitely won’t go down in the history books as one of the most complex and feature-packed apps that has ever graced the iOS and Mac App Stores, but with that said, when you set out to solve a problem, and you solve it with a very simple but functional solution, it really doesn’t need to be complex and bloated.
Check out the tool in action in the video embedded below.
Blink for Mac and iPhone/iPad can be downloaded from the links below.
(Download: Blink for Mac from the Mac App Store)
(Download: Blink for iPhone and iPad from the iOS App Store)
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