One thing that really started to annoy me in the new Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard was how quickly my computer would lock after the screensaver kicked in. There appeared to be no delay as there had been in Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard. The experience was consistent across my two work computers – a Macbook Pro and a Mac Pro, and my Mac Pro at home. In my previous world running 10.5 I had been able to move my mouse really quickly once I noticed the screensaver kicking in and the process of the OS locking would stop. Under the new OS 10.6 this didn’t seem to be the case – the very second the screensaver was enabled, the OS would lock and I would have to enter my password to unlock it.
Thankfully it turns out that this is configurable. Under System Preferences -> Security, there is a setting which allows you to cause a delay before the password lock happens. Watch this very short video below to see how you can configure this delay and hopefully improve your Snow Leopard experience even more. This video was recorded using the new Quicktime Player screen recording function, and cut, cropped and uploaded to YouTube using iMove ’09.