Restart is a small application that can be used to restart or shutdown your Macintosh at scheduled times. For example if you want your mac to shut itself down each night after you have gone home, or want it to restart to make sure that there is enough memory for vital applications such as backups, then Restart is for you :-).
You get the window shown in Figure 1. by choosing the options… item from the file menu.
The current time is the actual time of day. This is always changing as a constant reminder that none of us are getting any younger.
The activate time is the time that the machine will execute the action determined by the Shutdown or Restart buttons.
• NOTE: The Ignore unsaved work! checkbox is to be used with caution. Setting this option means that Restart will not try to preserve any of the currently running applications with unsaved or changed documents. It will just pull the rug out from underneath them! If you NEED to have your machine to restart then use this option with care. You have been warned.
To change the time click in the different sections of the time and each is highlighted and arrows appear allowing the numbers to be increased or decreased. See Figure 2.
Holding down the mouse will cause the arrows to auto-repeat making the numbers change quickly. At the limits the numbers will wrap around. So for example 59 minutes will become 0 minutes if the up arrow is pressed. When the limit is reached in the hour section the hour will wrap around and the am/pm will also be changed accordingly.
If the scheduled time is less that 5 minutes after the current time a warning is given that the mac will Restart/Shutdown at the scheduled time. If the time is greater that 5 minutes the program will do nothing until 5 minutes before the scheduled time. At that time if Restart is the current program an alert will be presented. If Restart is running in the background then it will notify the user by sending a notification. This will appear in front of whatever application is currently running.
•NOTE. Since Restart is an application if you QUIT it before the scheduled time and don't set it going again then _NOTHING_ will happen :-(
•IMPORTANT. Restart sends AppleEvents to the Finder to acheive both the Shutdowns and Restarts. After doing this the Finder will send a Quit AppleEvent to all of the active applications. If there are applications that have unsaved work, and you have chosen not to ignore this work then Restart will do nothing, since it will have quit. If you are sure that you want Restart to do it's own thing whatever… then you should choose to over-ride the unsaved document protection. See earlier warnings about this.
I look forward to hearing from people regarding suggestions for improvements or any lurking bugs.
Enjoy!
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(No cheques please unless you have no choice. The banks charge ridiculous amounts to cash foriegn cheques and they get rich instead of me ;-)
Peter Hardman.
Chemistry Department, Manchester University
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL UK.
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