Okay, so we’ve all heard of and mocked the BSOD (Blue/Black Screen of Death) on our computers. Today, I’m going to deride the Blue Screen of Dumb on my Apple. I just forceably shutdown my laptop by holding down the power button for 10 seconds. Was it hung? No. My mouse was still moving, it was still taking keyboard input, and Expose (Apple’s window switching effect) appeared to be working. What was the problem? My screen was blue.

When you plug an additional monitor into an Apple computer, it turns the screen a pleasant shade of soothing blue while it figures out how to add the second screen. Apple tries to protect the user from ugly screen change side-effects by covering them over with a uniform color. This way, even if your screen flickers and blinks, you won’t notice it so much. It’s one of the ways Apple politely pats the users on the head so they don’t have to be so worried about they’re computer.

The problem is that sometimes when you’re in a hurry and you don’t take the time to unplug the external monitor cable and wait for the blue screen to go away before closing your Apple laptop and putting it to sleep, when it comes time wake-up, the Apple sometimes leaves that pleasant Blue Screen of Dumb up. Interestingly, I can still tell where the password box is for my screen lock-out (corporate computers MUST HAVE SCREEN LOCK PASSWORDS you know) by moving the mouse around. If it moves off where the box is it turns into the pretty Apple wait pinwheel. If I move it back on, it becomes an arrow or the “I” cursor over where the text fields should be shown.

After typing my password and hitting “Enter” (which I don’t recommend doing if you think you had a chat window open before you shutdown that might be active again, that burned my on my Linux workstation the day when I told all my friends in the local LUG channel on IRC what my password was), after typing my password, I can then move the mouse into the corner that actives Expose and it turns to the finger cursor normally in place for Expose. Going back to the corner, it turns back to a regular pointer. All this indicates that if it weren’t for the Blue Screen of Dumb, I should be able to use my computer. In fact, I suppose if I were blind and had all the accessibility features turned on, I might not even notice since I can’t see the screen anyway.

The same thing has been known to happen with the lock-out screen, particularly if I get a little too eager to enter my password. I have my Mac set to lock the computer when waking up or after the screen saver starts as per company policy. However, if I start typing before the password box shows up (which can take several seconds after waking up because of how many programs I usually have running that it has to notify of the wakeup) then sometimes when I hit enter the password box goes away but this time the Black Screen of Dumb stays in place. This one I can almost always eliminate by closing my laptop again waiting about 30 seconds and then reopening and trying again.

Now, I know the real issue here is that properly handling sleep and wakeup is hard, very hard. I don’t know of anyone who’s had a computer running any OS that really got it right 100% of the time. Apples (other than the two issues I mention here) have got it about as close as I’ve seen in my experience, which is why I rarely hesitate to close my laptop lid to sleep at any point, even when I’ve been using a second monitor. These problems really don’t come up very often. I don’t know that that’s because of any particular ingenuity or good design on Apple’s part so much as it is that Mac OS X doesn’t run on anything but Apple hardware so there are fewer variations to test and debug.

Anyway, that’s just one annoyance on my Mac, but at least it doesn’t crash as often as any Windows laptop I’ve ever had. Furthermore, since there aren’t a lot of ways to tweak things under the hood without going into questionable territory I don’t attempt to break it as much as any Linux laptop I’ve ever had. :)

Cheers.