SafeSleep
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SafeSleep lets you use safe sleep on demand on your Mac
Editor's note: This app is no longer being developed or supported by the original developer. If you've ever wanted more control over Apple's "safe sleep" mode, the free SafeSleep.app from Side Tree Software is for you. If you've never heard of it before, you might be wondering what "safe sleep" is (but if you have heard of it, you can skip the next couple paragraphs). When the battery on one of Apple's notebook computers (including the MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and some late-model PowerBooks) is very low, OS X will put the machine into what Apple calls "safe sleep" mode. This is similar to standard sleep, except the contents of the RAM are completely written to the hard drive and all power shuts down. You can even remove the battery while the machine is in safe sleep. To wake the computer from safe sleep, press the power button on the computer. A progress bar will display (startup will be noticeably slower than a normal wake from sleep), then your computer will be restored to how it was before safe sleep was invoked. This feature is called "hibernation" in the Windows world, and it's one of the very few features I missed when I switched from Windows to Mac. (The other big one was how Windows deals with moving files, which can be replicated on the Mac side using moveAddict.) One of the nice things that Windows computers have is the ability to choose to hibernate when you are shutting down the machine. For years, I never turned my Windows laptop off; I only hibernated. Unfortunately, Apple has not made that feature available to Mac users. That's where SafeSleep.app comes in. When you launch the app, it displays several options. The one I'm most excited about is "Safe Sleep Now," which lets me choose safe sleep without having to change the way the Mac usually works. I can still just close the lid for normal sleep (or choose it from the window above), but if I want to make sure to trigger safe sleep, it's now much easier to do. "Always use Safe Sleep" will tell the computer to never use the normal, faster sleep mode. If you choose that and want to change it back later, select "Only Safe Sleep in Emergencies." You can also totally disable safe sleep; this isn't recommended for obvious reasons, but if you're willing to take the risk, disabling it can make the process of putting your Mac into "normal sleep" faster. Although safe sleep was designed for portable Macs, you can also use it on desktop Macs. At night, I use safe sleep on my iMac because, otherwise, it seems to wake from "normal sleep" on its own. A word of caution, however: be sure to unmount any external drives that are connected to your Mac before entering safe sleep. Even if they remain physically attached to the Mac, OS X thinks that the disk was ejected without being unmounted, which is something you want to avoid. Physically connected drives will automatically be remounted when the machine wakes from safe sleep. SafeSleep is free and can be downloaded from MacUpdate.
Ask TUAW: Clocks, screen guards, MacBook hard drive replacement, NFS automount, and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about replacing a MacBook hard drive, refreshing a NFS mount, getting a simple clock on screen, improving iCal's note handling, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify), or if it's an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.
Leopard's Boot Camp brings 'fast switching' between Mac OS X and Windows
Thanks to you TUAW readers, tips are rolling in on all the tiny and not-so-tiny features that Mac OS X Leopard will be bringing in October. One feature that is definitely not-so-tiny is something I'll dub 'fast switching' between Mac OS X and your Boot Camp Windows installation. While this isn't quite the built-in virtualization that some users were hoping for, it will minimize the startup, shutdown and boot times when switching between the two OSes. Detailed on Boot Camp's new features page, Apple has hooked their safe sleep feature into Boot Camp to allow Mac OS X to save all your open applications and windows, and then boot over into Windows. Once you're done in Windows, you can boot back over to Mac OS X and pick up where you left off - with all your open applications and documents put right back where you left them. This is a great idea and an interesting compromise between making it a little too easy to run Windows on your Mac, and it also keeps Apple from stepping on the toes of virtualization products from companies like Parallels and VMware.Thanks, Daniel
Widget Watch: Deep Sleep
Safe Sleep is basically a 'deeper sleep' feature that debuted on the 15-inch and 17-inch PowerBooks last year, and as far as I know, it's included (and enabled by default) on all of Apple's MacBook/Pro portables (and yes, I hear it's basically like the Windows 'Hibernate' state). This deep sleep differs from the typical Sleep state that most of us are used to: it writes everything currently in memory (your open apps, the files you're working on, etc.) to the hard drive, and actually powers down the machine, saving the battery power that slowly siphons during the normal Sleep mode. Waking from this mode naturally takes a little longer, and a progress bar unique to this feature is displayed while the machine is waking from Safe Sleep. If you want to see it in action, Rob Griffiths (of Macworld and Mac OS X Hints fame) posted a good video demonstration of Safe Sleep on his black MacBook (so jealous!) to YouTube. By default, the new MacBook/Pro behavior is to use a little of both worlds: they write everything to the drive while they're going to sleep, but still use 'regular Sleep' unless power is lost from both AC and the battery. If power is lost, the machine switches over to Safe Sleep automatically - yet another reason to send those Apple engineers a batch of cookies. But what if you want to bypass the regular Sleep status and use Safe Sleep by default all the time?Enter the Deep Sleep Dashboard widget - one-click access to putting your Mac down for an extended nap. Documentation is included with the widget explaining what's going on, and it also has a list of the machines known to support this feature. To top things off, if you just aren't a fan of widgets, the author also packaged Deep Sleep as a simple command line utility, linked in small print at the bottom of Deep Sleep's page.[via MacUser]
