MacMembraneThere are peels everywhere…

Recently I’ve been listening to a good deal of audiobooks, especially when falling off to sleep at night, and of course my Mac plays them for me. A major annoyance with this setup, though, is the super bright laptop screen illuminating the room and making me feel as if my bed is on a submarine. I’ve tried a few solutions to this problem - the most obvious being setting the Energy Saver preferences to sleep the display after a minute of inactivity. But this is a bit of work, and requires you to reset your sleep preferences in the morning. Workable, but not ideal (especially when you’re tired).

Enter Sleep Display, from Line Street Widgetry. This little app does exactly what the name implies:

When you run Sleep Display,

it IMMEDIATELY sleeps just your display so that you can continue running your background jobs. It doesn’t permanently affect your energy settings, so when you start working again, your monitor will not sleep immediately.

Moreover, after running the app, it automatically quits itself so you don’t have to.

Perfect - almost. You still need to keep the application in your dock if you want one-click access to total darkness. Perhaps an AppleScript would help? Of course it would!

tell application "SleepDisplay"
	activate
end tell

Create this script and stick it in your menubar script folder:

It’s not one click, but it gets the job done for me. Problem solved.

Download Sleep Display from Line Street Widgetry.