Lock Me Now

Leaving your Mac unattended and unlocked may lead to funny pranks in the office and, in some cases, a serious case of privacy invasion.

This program comes as a quicker alternative to putting your Mac to sleep mode from your Menu Bar and helps you prevent the aforementioned types of situations from happening.

The utility lives in your Menu Bar from where you can lock your Mac and configure the program's settings according to your needs. Its settings are very simple to configure and the tool immediately locks your Mac.

Locking your Mac with this program is like putting your computer to Sleep mode. Your monitor goes into sleep mode and once you hit a keyboard key or move your mouse, the Mac Login screen is displayed. Type your user password and you can resume your work.

A great thing is that you can define a global hotkey for immediately locking your Mac. Simply go to the Preferences -> General and enter your shortcut key in the empty field from the upper side of the window.

Only 2 aspects bothered me about this tool: I had to update the program after installing it to have access to its latest version and the fact that it. If you're a 10.12 macOS user, you need to alter some system-related settings to run Lock Me Now on your computer. You need to launch Terminal and enter the following line "sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Lock Me Now.app". The utility cannot run if you don't complete the aforementioned steps. It's a permission issue that usually happens on Sierra Macs.

Still, the aforementioned problems can be fixed even by a beginner Mac user. Also, the program works great afterwards and is completely free. I'd say it's worth a shot.