Background

I have three problems with my iMac’s in-built sleep feature:

1. When I click “sleep”, the screen goes black for a moment but then it wakes up again, forcing me to click “sleep” once more and be ever-so-careful not to move the mouse after the click;
2. When I click “sleep”, I immediately think of something I had forgotten to do, but by then the monitor is already in energy-saving mode and it takes a good few seconds to wake up again;
3. Sometimes, minutes or hours later, the Mac wakes up again by itself for no earthly reason. If it’s night-time and I didn’t shut down the computer then the sudden blinding light of my two screens is more than enough to wake me.

It was the third one that inspired me to code an app to fix all three problems: Sleep Well.

What it does

• Sleep Well puts your Mac to sleep, gracefully. Your screens fade to black, and after a few seconds’ grace, the computer is asleep;
• If your Mac wakes up by itself, your screens remain black (apart from the app window itself), and after a few seconds, Sleep Well tells your Mac to sleep again – you can cancel that and wake your Mac up properly with a click or a keypress.

How to use it

1. To sleep, click the big button in the middle of the Sleep Well window – or press the Carriage Return key;
2. To come out of sleep, you need to click or key-press* twice: once to get out of the Mac’s in-built sleep, and again to tell Sleep Well you don’t want it to send your Mac back to sleep.
3. *(optional) If you want to disable key-press-to-fully-awake, for example if you have a cheeky cat that loves to walk all over your keyboard, you can disable Sleep Well’s keyboard control via the Settings – via the app menu, or [command key]+[,].

F.A.Q.

• I’m a native French/German/Spanish speaker and your translation of […] is laughably wrong. May I suggest a proper translation?

Please do! I’m one chap working alone, and goodness knows I’m not a linguist! I do try to get accurate translations but rely heavily on online translation tools so inevitably I make some mistakes. Sorry! 😬

• Your app is so simple and yet I’ve found a bug. Loser!

That’s not a question but by all means send me a message detailing how to replicate the bug. Please read below for contact details.

• Your app is okay, I guess, but you know what it really needs? Zombies.

Uh-huh.

• How can this be a Frequently Asked Questions section when you’ve clearly made it all up in some sad, vainglorious attempt at wit?

That question seems rather rhetorical, and I really wish people would stop asking me it.

• How long did this app take to code?

One day!*

^{*polishing it and fixing other complications took disproportionately longer. See a future blog post series. 😉}

• That reminds me: don’t you ever update your brilliant blog anymore?!

Not so much. Sorry, Mum. 😊

Contact Me

Please send me your kind comments, suggestions, bug-reports, translation-improvements, haikus etc to my email: philip@writtenbyabriton.com – or comment below. Cheers! 💖