Comments on: Mac OS X: Putting displays to sleep with Dockables

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 01:10:59 +0000

My main screen is big enough (30″), so I don’t really hit the corners by accident. But I can see it can be a problem with smaller screens. There should be a setting that lets hot corners be less “hot” by only responding after the mouse pointer has been there for a few seconds.

By: Chris Karcher

Chris Karcher — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:30:15 +0000

Yea, I gave that a shot but found that I was accidentally turning off my display too frequently. This mainly happened when I was running a full screen Windows session in VMWare Fusion and would flick my mouse to different corners (Start Menu, “X” to close windows, etc…).

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:02:48 +0000

Thanks. It should be noted, however, that in Leopard display sleep can now be triggered using a hot corner (Screen Saver pref pane).

By: Chris Karcher

Chris Karcher — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:51:52 +0000

If you're using Leopard, I've written a simple Dashboard widget to put the display to sleep: http://www.chriskarcher.net/software/displaysleeper If you're using Tiger, there's another widget by Line Street Widgetry: http://linestreet.googlepages.com/sleepdisplaywidget

By: danridley

danridley — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:49:21 +0000

Another nice thing about the Dockables applications is that they can be launched with a hotkey from Quicksilver (and I would assume LaunchBar as well). Thus there’s no need to take up space on the Dock permanently.

(I recently found use for the Start Default Screen Saver Dockable, because I use SynergyKM on my Mac at work [to share the mouse and keyboard with a Windows machine on a second monitor], SynergyKM doesn’t play well with the screen saver hot corner; and starting the screen saver is the simplest way to lock the workstation when I walk away from it. I assigned the Dockable to Option-L, which is physically Windows Key-L, which matches the keystroke used to lock the Windows machine.)

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:34:48 +0000

Thanks for the update. A hot corner only is not ideal, but at least it is now accessible through the UI without a third-party product.

By: Paul Ingraham

Paul Ingraham — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:11:46 +0000

And an update: in Leopard, you will be able to put your display to sleep with a hot corner (and hopefully a hot key as well), as nature intended.

From Apple’s feature page for Leopard:

“In addition to launching Exposé or starting a screen saver, you can now use hot corners to put your display to sleep.”

By: Paul Ingraham

Paul Ingraham — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 02:58:52 +0000

Excellent. Thanks Pierre! And André!