Today marks the release of a very tiny little app that we whipped up over at ACM, that might come in handy to the rest of the world. It is called MOVE, and it unfortunately is not an acronym, just really loud. Alas:

MOVE is a small AppleScript Studio app that enforces logout of unattended publicaly accessible machines. It prompts the user (even on top of a screen saver) with a familiar Log Out dialog and lets the user choose “Cancel” or “Log Out.” Should the user cancel, MOVE simply quits, should the user click “Log Out,” the app will perform a standard log out process, prompting the user to save any open documents.

The distinguishing feature of MOVE is in it’s action on the timer expiry. Should the timer reach zero, MOVE will send SIGTERM to loginwindow, forcing logout without prompting for saving. It is not possible to cancel this logout, preventing the possibilities that: 1) a machine is not left in an unusable state with the screen locked and user missing in action, and 2) a user chooses Log Out from the Apple menu with unsaved documents open and leaves without responding to the prompts, leaving their account vulnerable to passers by.

So essentially, MOVE is a tool to force logout of unattended OS X machines, but provides a nice familiar interface in case it pops up and the computer really wasn’t unattended.

Download MOVE v1.4 (Universal):

MOVE.dmg.

Enjoy!