Today, we released Power Manager 3.7.4. This release is a minor update to fix memory leaks and to improve the powermanagerctl command line tool.
Power Manager 3.7.4 includes the ability to export schedules using unicode characters via the command line.
Power Manager 3.7.4 is recommended for all existing users of Power Manager 3, and is available to download now.
Power Manager lets you create on-demand events. These are events that can be manually triggered at any time. On-demand events appear in Power Manager’s status menu bar.

Power Manager's on-demand events appear in the status menu bar
By default, Power Manager’s on-demand events can only be triggered by administrator users. Triggering an on-demand event requires administrator rights, or for an administrator to provide their security credentials – name and password.
You may want to provide non-administrator colleagues with the ability to trigger on-demand events. This can be particularly useful where an event is used to perform back ups or run a script requiring elevated privileges.
Let’s look at how to ease this security requirement.
Continue reading →
Yesterday, we looked at starting a PowerPoint presentation to a schedule using Power Manager. We used a small AppleScript to open PowerPoint and start the presentation playing.
Today, we will walk through how to stop a Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation with Power Manager. As with starting a presentation, stopping the presentation will require a little AppleScript.
Continue reading →
We recently discussed how to both automatically start a Keynote presentation, and how to automatically stop a Keynote presentation, all to a schedule.
This time, I would like to cover how to automatically start a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation on Mac OS X using Power Manager. Unlike Keynote, starting a PowerPoint presentation requires a little bit of AppleScript. If you are not familiar with AppleScript, do not worry. We will walk through each step needed.

Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software
Continue reading →