Simple ShutDown Timer: Schedule Mac Shutdown, Restart & Sleep

Mountain Lion’s new features have earned a lot of attention and plenty of detailed coverage online. As far as new features go, Mountain Lion is one kitty that loves to nap, so much so that you need a Terminal command to stop Mountain Lion from going to sleep. If you aren’t that crazy about going to Terminal and then calculating the exact number of seconds needed to delay your system going to sleep, you will be glad to know there’s an app for that. Simple ShutDown Timer is a Mac app worth $0.99 that not only lets you schedule what time your system goes to sleep, but also allows you to schedule a system shutdown and restart. You have the option to choose both the date and time to set up a system sleep or shutdown schedule. Additionally, it requires your account password to create a schedule, preventing guest users from scheduling the system sleep and shutdown task. The app is available on a trial that allows you to run the app for only ten times before you have to buy a license.

Simple ShutDown Timer provides a simple interface and asks you to enter the date and time for shutting down, restarting or putting your system to sleep. Moreover, it asks you to enter your account password to authenticate the shutdown. Although the app asks for the administrator password, your account password is the one that works here. Once you’ve set the date & time and selected one of the three options, click Schedule the Task button.

Simple ShutDown Timer tells you that the task has been scheduled and then quits. The app doesn’t run in the background or in the menu bar. Once the task has been scheduled, you cannot change or overwrite the shutdown schedule.

Simple ShutDown Timer is a useful app and can be improved by perhaps adding a feature to trigger a shutdown, restart or sleep action when a particular app quits. This should be helpful in the event you have apps that quit when they have executed a function, but don’t support system shutdown. A good example of such an app would be the stable version of the uTorrent Mac client. Although the shutdown when download completes option is available in the beta version of uTorrent, there may be plenty of other apps out there that have yet to add this feature.