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Glossary

  • Blocking / keeping awake — holding off the screensaver and system sleep. The reasons can be manual, timer, agent session, and they overlap.
  • Mode / status — what the Mac is doing: Idle, Keeping awake (the Mac says “Screensaver blocked”), Timer running, Agent session. On the phone also Sleeping.
  • Presence — whether the Mac is reachable: Online (heard from within 90 s), Recently seen (under 10 min), Sleeping, Offline. A separate fact from mode.
  • Last seen — when the Mac last spoke. Checked iCloud — when the phone last read the Mac’s status and got an answer.
  • Timer — a countdown that keeps the Mac awake and sleeps it at zero.
  • Agent session — a lease an AI agent holds on the Mac being awake, with a task name. Ended by the agent, by its host’s hook at the end of a reply, by the master switch, by a low battery, or — only for a session that asked for sleep or shutdown — by the session timeout.
  • Journal — the Mac’s append-only record of what AtControl did; mirrored to paired phones. The page that shows it is Stats.
  • Setup assistant — the three-step overlay on a fresh install.
  • Pairing — the one-time QR handshake between a Mac and a phone. Pairing window — the ten minutes the QR is valid. Pairing link — the same secret as text.
  • Trusted device — a phone whose key the Mac accepted (or a Mac the phone accepted).
  • Command — block, unblock, sleep, shut down, sent from the phone; signed; answered with a signed result.
  • Someone at the Mac — the alarm raised when input returns to an idle Mac.
  • Remote-access monitoring — the watcher for screen-sharing, VNC, remote-desktop and SSH connections.
  • Ways in (agent) — Shortcuts / App Intents (request and response) and the URL scheme / deeplinks (one-way).
  • Capability token — the per-Mac secret an atcontrol:// deeplink must carry when the URL scheme’s protection is Require a token. Shortcuts needs none.
  • Deeplink protection — how the URL scheme, when on, decides whom to believe: Refuse links opened by apps (default; command-line tools pass), Require a token, or No protection.
  • Wrapper — one of the five signed shortcuts that hand a call to AtControl.
  • Guide — the agent instructions shipped inside the app (atcontrol-agent/).
  • Service Mode — developer builds only: sleep and shutdown are simulated.