Help - Yosemite Screen Saver reverting

mockej

Hi all

I am experiencing a most frustrating disaster with Yosemite and the Mac Screen Saver.

I have set up a 2-channel video for a well-known South African artist to play on a constant loop at the Venice Biennale (which is on right now). The playback is via Isadora, and a startup script launches the work and ensures that playback is full screen and foregrounded. Before shipping the system, I ran it for a day without problems and ensured that all screen saver and power saving options were disabled.

Today (after the work has been running on and off for a week) a gallerist contacted me and said that a screen saver has appeared. This is a disaster, and especially frustrating as I can't be on site to properly look into it.

I am trying to think of solutions... one would be to include a script that makes an innocuous mouse or keyboard event happen every few minutes. Or perhaps to programme the disabling of the screen saver into the startup script.

Any ideas would be appreciated... and also any confirmation of this happening to anyone else.

I did find this in an online forum:

"My personal experience is that Yosemite ignores your screen saver settings... it adheres to them for a little while then simply does whatever it wants. It's a new nuisance bug in Yosemite... not a fatal issue, but just frustrating.

For example, you can't really turn it off. Well, not for more than a day or two, when it decides to turn itself back on. And, if you pick a specific screen saver, don't get too attached, because Yosemite will change that in a couple of days as well."

Any thoughts??

Take care

m

nick

Haven't tried it with Yosemite, but you could try this

http://www.sticksoftware.com/software/Jiggler.html

nick

A brief test shows it still works and you can set it to wiggle every x amount of time if an application with 'Isadora' in the name is running, but haven't done long test with it and Yosemite.

fifou

I always use this when working on a show : http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/
But I didn't tried it on Yosemite.

Best
Philippe

Skulpture

Jiggler looks interesting thank you. I was looking for something like this a while back.

crystalhorizon

Thanx for the jiggler link

mockej

Hi all, thanks for the great input.

Just tried Jiggler on Yosemite and works perfectly... I think I will try get the people in Venice to install it as it may also take care of an issue where the mouse pointer sometimes showed up & disappeared when moving the mouse. Thanks @nick!

Thanks also for the Caffeine link @fifou.

Initially I added a loop at the end of my startup script which sends a keypress on the "y" key every few minutes. This worked fine when I tested at home, but ended up making shutdown complicated on the other side as Izzy would not quit while the script was running (odd).

In stead I then added some lines (not my own) to the script that would disable all power saving and screen savers at startup (own user name and password in quotes of course):

-- disable screensaver, displaysleep and sleep times

do shell script "/usr/bin/defaults -currentHost write com.apple.screensaver idleTime -int 0"

do shell script "pmset -a displaysleep 0" user name "username" password "password" with administrator privileges

do shell script "pmset -a sleep 0" with administrator privileges

Thanks again for all the feedback!

m