Midnight

When it’s time to leave your Mac for a while, you want a quick way of putting it to sleep and a little bit of flexibility in how you do it.

Midnight is a Dashboard widget designed to help you put your Mac to sleep in the way you want and at double speed.

Sleep vs. Hibernation

Midnight can either put your Mac into its standard sleep mode or into hibernation mode (also referred to as “safe sleep” or “deep sleep”).

• Standard Sleep: Your Mac reduces its power consumption to a minimum by stopping its processor but maintaining the supply of power to (and thus preserving the current contents of) the RAM.
• Hibernation (Safe Sleep): No power is used at all. Your Mac copies its current RAM contents onto the hard disk, allowing it to fully cut power to the RAM and restore the exact state when you wake it up later.

Apple calls hibernation “safe sleep.” Its purpose is to ensure that data stored in RAM is not lost if there is a loss of power during normal sleep mode. Apple officially supports safe sleep on Intel books and desktops, but you won’t find a setting to turn it on or off in System Preferences on these Macs.

Smart Admin Delegation

In addition to choosing a particular sleep mode, you can choose whether your Mac should switch to the log-in screen before going to sleep.

Only an administrator can turn safe sleep on or off permanently, but you don’t need to change the safe sleep settings permanently. You only need to change them temporarily when you have asked Midnight to hibernate and want them to go back to standard when your Mac wakes up. Fortunately, Midnight is a clever utility and can handle this for you without ever needing to know your administrator’s password.