Hands on: Jolt 1.0

To save energy--and prolong the life of my displays--I have Mac OS X set up to sleep my displays after a few minutes of inactivity. This feature works well, but there are times when it's inconvenient. For example, when I'm watching video in a Web browser, shows I've recorded using EyeTV, or Tivo-transfered video in Toast Video Player, I'm not moving the mouse; OS X sees this as "inactivity" and dutifully dims the display.

In such situations, you can manually go into Energy Saver preferences and disable display sleep, and then re-enable it later, but that's a hassle. A solution I previously covered is Jiggler, which wiggles--or, if you will, jiggles--your mouse cursor periodically to prevent your Mac from going to sleep. But Jiggler is intended for times when you're not actually sitting at your computer; it can be distracting to see your mouse moving around when you're trying to watch a video.

Another solution is Drifting Light's Jolt 1.0 (free or US$5), which provides a systemwide menu-bar icon that lets you temporarily disable display sleep. A quick click on the Jolt menu icon enables the default no-sleep mode of five minutes; the menu icon turns red for the duration of the effect. You can disable no-sleep mode early by clicking the menu icon again.

If you pay $5 for the full version of Jolt, you get five configurable no-sleep modes; you can customize the duration of each as 3, 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minutes, or "Forever" (the last essentially meaning "don't sleep the display until I manually disable no-sleep mode"). A nice touch is the capability to customize the Jolt menu icon with a different color for each mode; for example, the icon can be Orange for 60 Minutes and red for Forever, so it's easy to determine which mode you've enabled.

However, accessing these options, and enabling a mode other than the default, isn't obvious. Since clicking on the Jolt menu-bar icon toggles the default mode on and off, viewing Jolt's menu and accessing its preferences dialog requires you to Command-click on the icon. And I wish the customizable durations were more customizable; for example, if I'm watching a movie, I want to disable screen dimming for longer than an hour. A two-hour mode and a mode where you could enter a specific duration would be welcome improvements.