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Bogus hint
Authored by: Basilisk on Jul 09, '03 12:13:46PM

Folks, don't do this. This technique is only necessary because of the mistaken belief that launching ScreenSaverEngine.app is the correct way to lock your system.

Yes, I'm aware that this method is popular, and is even covered in many hints on this site, but it is wrong, and doesn't do what people think. Launching the screensaver engine this way is not the same method used by the system itself. Because of this, when you launch the ScreenSaverEngine.app once (for desktop background) you can't launch it again from Youpi Key or elsewhere. This is because the app is already open and MacOS doesn't let you double-launch an app.

As for why not to start the screensaver password this way, try the following test (be careful, this leads to a problem documented below):

1. Set you system screensaver start time to 5 minutes.
2. Launch ScreenSaverEngine.app
3. Wait 5 minutes.

After the 5 minutes have passed the windowmanager will start the screensaver a second time, leading to flickering screensaver of doom (both savers fight to be front and recieve keystrokes during password entry). With some patience you can usually get one to take a password and eventually quit, or just force restart the machine.

Properly launching the screensaver requires the use of an undocumented API in ScreenSaver.framework, which uses the windowmanager to launch the screensaver. This works correctly, and the screensaver won't double launch (no flicker of doom) and doesn't conflict with the desktop screensaver.

How do I know all this? Becuase I had a similar problem and had to figure out how Apple's keychain menu extra does this properly (never double-launched, no conflcit with desktop background). I've since written an app to do this properly, look for SleepTight to appear on VersionTracker in the next couple of days.

Bas



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