This is a repost of a comment I made on macosxhints.com forums... It relates to Apple's new "Reduce the brightness of the built-in display when using this power source" setting in the Battery settings of System Preferences > Energy Saver. When checked, this causes my PowerBook to dim the screen slightly (it actually is the equivalent of going down three clicks with the brightness buttons) to save power when you unplug the AC adapter. It also brightens the screen three clicks when you plug back in.
Since I bought the marvellous book Mac OS X Panther Hacks, half a year ago, I've been running a hack to do exactly this. It involved a ruby script which called a bit of GUI Applescripting to dim the screen every time the power supply changed from AC to battery. The side effect was that you actually saw the whole process: System Prefs launched, switched the brightness, and quit. The advantage over the new Apple setting is that you could define just how dim the screen would be set.
Since I generally want to aim for maximum battery life when I move away from AC, I had it dim quite a bit lower than Apple's new default of 3 steps below whatever your current brightness setting is.
Apple's implementation of this fairly essential feature is much slicker than the hack was (though the hack still works on Tiger) so I'd like to switch. My question is: is anyone clever enough to figure out which cryptic system preference file holds the "reduce the brightness by 3 clicks" instruction so we can change it, say to 8 clicks lower?
Since I bought the marvellous book Mac OS X Panther Hacks, half a year ago, I've been running a hack to do exactly this. It involved a ruby script which called a bit of GUI Applescripting to dim the screen every time the power supply changed from AC to battery. The side effect was that you actually saw the whole process: System Prefs launched, switched the brightness, and quit. The advantage over the new Apple setting is that you could define just how dim the screen would be set.
Since I generally want to aim for maximum battery life when I move away from AC, I had it dim quite a bit lower than Apple's new default of 3 steps below whatever your current brightness setting is.
Apple's implementation of this fairly essential feature is much slicker than the hack was (though the hack still works on Tiger) so I'd like to switch. My question is: is anyone clever enough to figure out which cryptic system preference file holds the "reduce the brightness by 3 clicks" instruction so we can change it, say to 8 clicks lower?