Filed under: Portables, Cool tools, Freeware, Widget Watch
Sleep Display, put your monitor to sleep instantly
Sleep Display does one simple thing: run it and it puts your display immediately to sleep, no fuss, no muss. Of course you could turn manually down the backlight, go to the Energy Saver Preference Pane, or even put the entire computer to sleep, but Sleep Display shortcuts all of this: run the application and the display goes dark. Hit a key or move the mouse and the display wakes up. It's perfect for use with Quicksilver. This is a great boon to portable users especially, since the display tends to be the biggest drain on the battery (and running it doesn't affect your normal Energy Saver settings). On my iMac I've had some problems with automatic display sleeping (i.e. it often simply doesn't work), but this little application does the trick just fine. Another great thing about Sleep Display is that when you run it, it sleeps the display and then quits, so it's not running all the time. I think the icon (right) could use a little work, but since I hardly ever see it, I don't think that's a big deal.
There's also a Dashboard widget version if you swing that way. Sleep display is a free download for either the application or the widget version.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Greg Perkins said 3:46PM on 4-21-2007
Odd, maybe it's not meant for use with a MacBook Pro, but when I start Sleep Display, it immediately puts the display to sleep, however, it wakes within a second and a half.
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Paul Carroll said 5:26PM on 4-21-2007
Mine is also sleeping for a second or two, then snapping back on.
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Klemens said 5:45PM on 4-21-2007
Mine works...at the least the widget. This is great. I've been looking for something like this for years.
I can't believe Apple doesn't include this as a feature for exposé. The only way to somewhat darken my screen before without going to standby was having the picture-screensaver with a black image... which was not that effective. Apple, are you listening??
Well anyway, this is really good.
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piggy said 6:11PM on 4-21-2007
There is a known bug that this app doesn't work when your existing display settings are "never". If you change it to anything else, e.g. 30 min, it should work (at least it does for me).
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iDarbert said 5:56PM on 4-21-2007
The application doesn't work too well, but the widget does - pure genius.
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Rick said 5:56PM on 4-21-2007
Greg and Paul,
I had the same problem. It appears to happen when the sleep display timer in the Energy Saver pref pane is set to "never". Setting that slider to anything else fixed Sleep Display for me.
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Josh said 9:52PM on 4-21-2007
I can't say I ever had too much trouble holding Fn+F1.
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Dan said 10:50PM on 4-21-2007
Check the following thread at MacOSXHints.com for an explanation to how this works:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2005080905050737
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gwailo said 11:33PM on 4-21-2007
There is a handy little screensaver that does this called BlackenedPixels.
"Not only does it turn your screen black, but it also powers down all the displays to keep the room cool and dark." I have whatever screensaver I am using at the time mapped to a Quickey. 1 key and both my monitors go black. Couldn't be easier. It is freeware and it is available from the folks at http://b-l-a-c-k-o-p.com/BlackenedPixels.html.
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tomas said 2:47AM on 4-22-2007
It doesn't work for me, even if i set my display sleep settings to anything other than never
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JD said 3:14AM on 4-22-2007
At first I thought, what's the point of this since it takes a second or two to launch the app or widget, which is exactly how long it takes to press and hold the display-dim key until the display goes off. But then I realized the real time savings comes when you wake the display back up again, which is almost a full second faster this way.
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Mark said 6:39AM on 4-22-2007
Ah, finally an app that actually sleeps the display! I always dim my screen normally, but this doesn't actually turn it off (only the backlight.) This app is much preferred.
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Tom Strong said 11:00AM on 4-22-2007
Cool! I got the widget version. This is the best thing I've found on the internet in a month. Thanks, TUAW!
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dgandy said 1:17PM on 4-22-2007
I like this little app a lot, but I also use Jiggler to prevent my computer from sleeping when music is playing. This creates a problem when I use Sleep Display and Jiggler at the same time (such as when i am listening to music as i go to sleep). Jiggler will inevitably wiggle my mouse which then wakes up the display. Does anyone have any other solutions to preventing the mac from sleeping other than jiggler, or changing my power settings?
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john russell said 8:20PM on 4-22-2007
I've been waiting for this feature to use with my Dell monitor for just over a year now. That's when I switched from Windows and had an app to do a similar thing. Now I've mapped it to one of the extra F-keys using Quicksilver. Works like a charm!
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Mike Harris said 2:24AM on 4-23-2007
Fantastic idea for an app. I'm wondering how it does it immediately, though; pmset didn't seem very favorably inclined towards an instant activation ...
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carl said 7:12AM on 4-23-2007
It doesn't work for me for me either, even after i changed all my energy savings sleep settings to anything other than Never.
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John Bailey (BDog) said 11:44PM on 4-23-2007
You should really check out LightMe.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/24583
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Nemo said 7:50PM on 5-30-2007
i've tried sleep display and lightme both without energy savings settings set to never. the screen wakes up after 10 seconds maximum when i am running logic pro. any ideas anyone???
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