OS X application start/stop hook

I had the same issue (I use iTunes on Windows 7). I Bought a new iPhone 5 and used the Backup / Restore method to move my stuff from the old iPhone 4S to the new one. The process only restored all the Apple apps, plus Contacts, Phone Calls, and Messages. When I tried to backup again - hoping it would restore the rest - it went through a restore process in iTunes (for about 5 minutes) and then I got the message that my iPhone will restart but never did (I had to restart it manually).

What I also noticed was that, when I retried, the Backup seemed to be very quick.

I called Apple Support who said that there is a problem with the Backup process. I would be able to restore my Apps via the Purchased Apps process but I would lose all my user data (such as games progress). I was extremely frustrated because I use my iPhone and iPad as tools, not game devices.

I went to the App Store on the iPhone and started downloading some of the Purchased apps from the what seemed to be the iCloud. To my surprise, all app data was there (eg. WhatsApp chats, and The Vault data). I am not sure how this works because I never deliberatelly setup app backup on the cloud, but I suspect that the "Documents and Data" == "On" setting on Settings --> iCloud does exactly that, and in return does not include this information on the PC backup.

All seems fine now (at least for the apps for which I care and tried). The issue I still have is this uncertainty on what exactly is my iPhone doing and where is my stuff at any point in time.

If you want to actually save energy, use brightness.c instead of Shady. Shady doesn't reduce the backlight levels of displays, and LCDs usually require a similar amount of energy to display dark and bright pixels.

You can see the time since the last human input device (keyboard or mouse) action with ioreg:

ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | awk '/HIDIdleTime/{print $NF/1000000000;exit}'

If you are for example wathing a video with VLC, pmset -g assertions will contain a line like this:

   PreventUserIdleSystemSleep     1

So you might use a script like this:

#!/bin/bash

while sleep 0.5; do
  idle=$(ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | awk '/HIDIdleTime/{printf "%i",$NF/1000000000;exit}')
  current=$(brightness -l | awk '/display 0: brightness/{print $NF}')
  if [[ $idle -ge 10 ]] && pmset -g assertions | grep -q 'PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep *0'; then
    [[ $current != 0.000000 ]] && old=$current
    brightness 0
  else
    [[ $old ]] && brightness $old
  fi
done

It doesn't make any sense to execute over ten new processes every second though.