The Screen Saver

Background

While it doesn't show you pictures of Tribbles or Mickey Mouse, Sleeper does dim your screen effectively.  Some people insist that, due to advances in phosphor coating technology, today's displays don't have "burn-in" problems like the original Mac did.  Regardless of whether this is true or not, dimming the screen also keeps your Mac from distracting you, keeps others from peering at work in progress, and reduces power consumption by about 23%, even for non Energy Star compliant monitors (Byte Magazine, January 1994, page 204).

If you have an Energy Star compliant monitor, you can reduce power consumption even more by using Sleeper's Energy Star feature to power down the monitor when it's not being used.  Details about this are in the next section.

 



















Setup

To turn on Sleeper's screen saver, simply click on the Screen Saver tab in the Sleeper control panel, and turn on the Use screen saver checkbox.  Use the Delay slider to set the number of minutes your mouse and keyboard should be idle before Sleeper dims the screen.  If you want to set a delay higher or lower than the slider allows, option-click on the slider.

The Brightness slider controls how dark the screen gets when it dims.  If Sleeper was installed when your Mac was started up, moving the brightness slider will temporarily change the brightness of your screen to show you how it will look when Sleeper's screen saver is active.  To avoid the brightness preview, you can option-click on the slider and enter a numerical value directly.

The Flash keyboard LEDs when attention is required checkbox is enabled if you have an extended keyboard that has the green LED lights on the right hand side.  Usually, applications that need attention will flash an icon over the Apple or application menus in the menu bar.  When the screen is dimmed, you won't be able to see this, so Sleeper provides the option of flashing the keyboard lights to let you know that something needs your attention.

The Don't wake up for mouse movement checkbox tells Sleeper not to undim the screen until a key or mouse button is pressed, rather than whenever the mouse is moved.  This prevents your screen from undimming when the mouse is bumped. 

Sleeper also allows you to put the mouse in one corner of the screen to dim immediately, and in another corner to prevent the screen from dimming even after you Mac has been idle longer than the screen saver delay time.  The Dim Now and Dim Never buttons allow you to select these corners, and the Use hot corners checkbox lets you to turn the feature on and off.  Note that on multiple-monitor systems, the hot corners are the corners of the screen with the menu bar on it.


Additional Notes

Sleeper works by changing the monitor's gamma table, which controls the brightness of the signals which drive the display.  Doing this requires Color Quickdraw and GDevice support for your monitor(s), so Sleeper's screen dimming will not work on the "compact" Mac models (512, Plus, SE, SE/30, Classic).  If you use Sleeper on one of these machines, the screen saver will be disabled, but the disk sleep feature will still work.