// the find
alyssaxuu/later
Save all your Mac apps for later with one click 🖱️
Later is a macOS menu bar app that hides or closes every running app in one click, saves that set as a session, and reopens it on demand or after a timer. It suits people who want a clean desktop before a screen share, or a way to stop work without quitting apps by hand. The author says they no longer maintain it, so treat it as a working reference more than a supported product.
- The mechanism is easy to follow: save the set of running apps, hide or terminate them, and restore the same set later. The README options (terminate instead of hide, an ignore list, scheduled reopen) map onto clear parts of the app-state logic.
- The battery argument is concrete. Closing idle apps instead of leaving them open saves power, and the feature is built around that trade-off rather than a vague productivity claim.
- The project is one Xcode project with a small surface area, so a developer can read the whole thing in an afternoon and see how a menu bar app handles activation, quitting and restoring.
- The last push was in April 2023, and the author says they no longer maintain it. The README sets macOS 11.6 as the minimum, and nothing in the repo shows it has been checked against recent macOS releases.
- The app is unsigned and not notarised, and the install steps tell users to get past Gatekeeper with a right-click Open. A prebuilt Later.dmg is also committed to the repo, so the binary cannot be tied to the source without building it yourself.
- The README does not say what a restored session includes. Window positions, document state and app order are not mentioned, so expect app-level restore only until you check the code.
- The tree shows no test files or test target, so every change has to be checked by hand, and a regression in restore logic would only show up when someone runs it.