Later - Free and Open-Source and a Security Risk

Later is a Mac menu bar app that saves and restores any workspace easily. You may want to save a workspace for several reasons:

• To save battery life by closing your open apps while transporting your laptop
• To take a break
• To work on a different project with different apps
• To take screenshots for a document
• To share your screen in a meeting

With Later you can choose to hide or close your open apps. You can exclude system apps (Finder, System Settings, App Store, Activity Monitor) from being affected. There are four presets for reopening your apps (15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours) and you can manually restore them from hiding or a closed state with the click of a button.

Later was created by developer Alyssa X who has since turned the source code and the project over the the FOSS community. You can download Later on Github.  There are multiple forks of the original code.

Later triggered a Little Snitch warning by trying to connect to a web address I did not recognize, and it requested permission to access areas of my computer I didn't see a reason for it to access. I denied all the requests without affecting the functionality of the app. I further inspected the app's security features and found that it is not notarized, and it has an ad-hoc signature. For these reasons I cannot recommend this app.