Keeping the screen active with no touch?

I’ve written a little application, OnTopic, which helps time meetings and conferences, displaying a nice timeline of events. My intention is to create something that’s “digital signage” that can be used to display the next meetings in a schedule, or topics within a meeting-- the kind of thing that could be put on a wall, or projected on a big screen.

It all works dandy, except for one little thing: after a few minutes of no activity, the screen blacks out.

I know I have some apps that don’t time out, no matter how long I let them hang around. Short of forcing people to go into their settings and adjust auto-lock, is there anything I can do to keep the screen bright and active while the timer display is up and running? I hate to have people set their screen to auto-lock never just to accomodate this one app.

This would be fairly simple to add to Codea but I’m not sure when we’ll be able to get around to it. Perhaps in the next update. Please add this to the issue tracker so we can keep track of it.

I imagine the API would be something like:

-- false by default, resets when app closes
sleepDisabled(true)

.@Mark if you are using the Codea Runtime to publish your app, you can add this line of Objective-C to disable sleep and screen dimming:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] setIdleTimerDisabled:YES];

Thanks, @ John and @ Simeon. The line for the runtime is perfect for my needs.

OnTopic, the meeting and conference timer, is off to the App Store.