Sleep Aid app review

A few weeks back, I was contacted by Sam Rowlands of Ohanaware, a long-time indie Mac developer (remember Funtastic Photos? I used to have a blast using this editing app back when my main Mac was the 12-inch PowerBook G4). Sam informed me about the imminent release of Ohanaware’s latest application, Sleep Aid, and asked me if I wanted to review it. Of course, was my response. I was then provided with a NFR licence and a link to download the app.

This is not a sponsored review, nor was I given editorial input or anything of the sort. If anything, I was encouraged to be as honest as possible in my observations. I think this is enough of a disclaimer, so let’s proceed with the review.

First and foremost, I have to apologise for the delay. The app’s official launch was June 23. I had hoped to be a bit more prompt with my review, but I’ve been exceptionally busy with my day job these last months. I also didn’t want to rush my impressions or miss anything essential.

What does Sleep Aid do? As the name suggests, the app is meant to monitor your Mac’s sleep and help figure out any sleep-related issues. Specifically — and I quote Ohanaware’s blog:

When the Mac was pretending to be asleep.

When the Mac suffered Unusual Insomnia, Excessive Insomnia and Long Insomnia.

When the Mac awakes directly after being sent to sleep.

When the Mac was woken by Notifications, Bluetooth, Siri and others.

When Sleep Settings, Sleep Aid or the Mac OS was changed.

In theory, this is the kind of very geeky, very specific app that could potentially be abstruse to operate or understand. Quite the contrary. What’s admirable about Ohanaware’s work here is that they’ve created a very Mac-like and user-friendly interface to display and interact with what would otherwise be boring or complex stuff.

You recognise the experience and expertise of a long-time Mac developer from that attention to detail Apple used to teach everyone and then forgot after Steve Jobs’s passing. An important detail in Sleep Aid is the onboarding. Ohanaware knows that the app could be a bit hard to interpret for a regular user, so when you first run Sleep Aid, you’re presented with a series of (skippable) Welcome screens that give you an overview of the app.

These six screens are brief, well-designed, and manage to tell you everything you need to know to use Sleep Aid. I can’t overstate how good an idea this is. Too many apps today just throw their user interface in your face, explain little about how to navigate it, often present controls and UI elements users have to decipher/test themselves in a trial-and-error fashion, and most crucially lack a meaningful in-app Help system. On this front, Sleep Aid makes for an excellent first impression. I mean, just look at its in-app Help homepage:

Here’s Sleep Aid’s main interface (in Dark Mode):

I’ve chosen to feature an image provided with the press kit because it shows a variety of sleep/wake situations that I simply couldn’t reproduce in my testing (I tested Sleep Aid on two Macs, one that is specifically set to not go to sleep, and a laptop that has no real sleep problems, so both their outputs didn’t make for a representative, encompassing UI example).

Sleep Aid’s interface isn’t really that different from a calendar or agenda app. But instead of recording your appointments and events, it keeps track of your Mac’s sleep/wake cycles, every hour of every day, and retains the last two weeks of sleep history, so that you can have a broader picture of what’s happening with your Mac’s sleep. In case of issues and anomalous periods of insomnia, by having the possibility to check over such an extended interval, you could take note of possible patterns and unwanted events that trigger insomnia on a regular basis.

Of course, you can select a specific chunk of activity and see detailed information about it. Here, I have selected the activity for the morning of Saturday 9 July on my iMac:

Note that, as I was hinting before, my iMac is specifically set to avoid sleep when the display is turned off (I had to do this because too often my Razer BlackWidow Elite keyboard was unresponsive after waking up the iMac), that’s why you’re seeing all those red blocks in my calendar. If there were an application or process preventing my iMac from sleeping, Sleep Aid would show it under the Potential software causes section.

In any case, when you’re in this view, by pressing the Suggestions button in the right sidebar you’re directed to Sleep Aid’s Help and offered an explanation of the possible causes preventing your Mac from sleeping, and relevant solutions you can try to see whether things improve.

Two important sections of Sleep Aid are invoked by pressing the Sleep Check and Sleep Settings buttons above the calendar view.

Sleep Check shows Settings and Applications that prevent idle sleep. As you can see, on my voluntarily insomniac Mac, I get a warning that the “Mac is set to stay awake when the display is off” — and the great thing about this is that if I had set this up accidentally, the app can help correct the issue by providing a Fix button on the right.

Sleep Settings both incorporates settings you normally access via the Energy Saver preference pane, and also offers additional features that are specific to Sleep Aid, and these are very useful: you can, in fact, disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth during sleep, and pause Apple Music during sleep. This removes the risk of Bluetooth devices accidentally waking up your Mac (Sleep Aid will, of course, re-enable all wireless connections on wake). If any setting that’s already in place will prevent the Mac from going to sleep, the Sleep Settings panel will tell you about it. Again, my iMac is set to not sleep when the display is off, and I get the warning here as well:

On laptops, you also get additional useful information regarding battery discharge when you select a specific monitored interval. Battery discharge is always a useful additional indicator, both of battery performance as a whole, and of possible anomalous behaviour triggered perhaps by some rogue background process. My 11-inch MacBook Air’s battery looks normal during a regular period of ‘screen off’:

Of course, not all periods of insomnia have to be anomalous. Here, this red block of insomniac activity may be concerning at first blush, but clicking on it reveals that the reason for the insomnia was the AppleFileServer process. In other words, the MacBook Air had File Sharing active, and I had mounted a couple of MacBook Air’s folders on my iMac’s Desktop. With such a connection between the two Macs, the MacBook Air was not allowed to sleep. After unmounting the folders and closing the connection, things went back to normal.

Conclusion

Thankfully, none of the Macs I currently use suffer from strange sleep issues. (My Power Mac G4 Cube does, and I wish there were some vintage Sleep Aid equivalent to diagnose that!) But even if you, like me, have well-behaved Macs with reliable sleep/wake cycles, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy this app. Sometimes (especially in recent times), a minor Mac OS update could be enough to disrupt a good sleep cycle, maybe because of a bug or a change in the OS that makes an otherwise innocuous background system process behave erratically.

Sleep Aid is a tool that does something powerful behind the scenes while presenting a clear, straightforward user interface. There is no other sleep analysis tool like this for the Mac. It’s disarmingly simple to use: you open the app and leave it running. It doesn’t install anything anywhere, no Login Items, daemons, extensions, nothing of the sort. And the app itself is extremely lightweight as a process, so leaving it open won’t impact your Mac’s performance at all.

Another thing I love about Sleep Aid is that, unlike an awful lot of new Mac apps released nowadays, it has very generous system requirements: it supports Mac OS versions as old as Mac OS 10.13.6 and is of course compatible with both Intel and Apple silicon Macs.

You can download it from its dedicated product page on Ohanaware’s website. A 14-day free trial is available, and it’s enough to evaluate the app. There is no subscription (another plus, in my book): a licence costs $25 ($15 as a Launch promotion price until August 12, 2022) and it gives you one year’s worth of updates and support. Licences are renewed manually, which means that if you don’t renew your licence, you can continue using the last version of the app you’re entitled to.

I think Sleep Aid is well worth its price, and in all honesty I would have purchased it even if I hadn’t been generously given a free licence for testing and reviewing purposes. Talented Mac developers capable of delivering ingenious apps that are also very Mac-like and thoughtfully designed from a UI standpoint, are an endangered species, and in my view they deserve all the support we can give.

Note: The good folks at Ohanaware have provided readers of this blog an extra $5 off Sleep Aid’s launch promotion price: just enter the coupon code MORRICK when purchasing your licence to apply the discount.