Blair Neal has a great blog post about configuring an OSX computer to run an installation for ever. http://blairneal.com/blog/installation-up-4evr/.

I have been working on a ofxMacUtils addon with utils for making this process easier, so you don’t have to manually adjust the settings. It is still being developed, but thought it might be useful.

It has been tested on OSX 10.8 – 10.10 and OF v0.08. Any feedback would be appreciated ( through github, the comments on my blog don’t seem to be functioning properly).

InstaFigurator

A gui application for quickly configuring a mac for a long term installation.
Download the InstaFigurator.app
Screen Shot 2015-03-14 at 7.52.25 PM

We like to use the energy saver schedule in the system preferences to set the computer to shut down and start up at specific times. Avoiding third party apps for this leads to a more universal understanding of how to set the schedule. Most system admins will know how to set the schedule via system preferences. However, one issue that I have run into recently (OSX 10.10) is this message.
Screen Shot 2015-03-10 at 1.54.15 PM

The computer is either trying to restart or shutdown based on the schedule or manually selection and the OF app is preventing it from completing that task.

The addon includes an example for avoiding this issue.