About the Battery Maintenance Process

If you read Apple’s About Notebook Batteries page, you will see that they recommend using your machine on battery power regularly. If your machine is plugged in most of the time, then Apple recommends that you charge and discharge your battery about once a month.

A FruitJuice Maintenance Cycle consists of charging your battery to full and then discharging (i.e. running on battery) until the percent charge drops below 20%.

FruitJuice will use the system Notification Center to walk you through the process and will let you know when you’re done.

FruitJuice knows how much time you spend on battery compared to your overall usage time.

Using this information, FruitJuice recommends how much time to spend on battery each day. If you follow these recommendations, then you will likely never see the Maintenance Cycle (aside from the initial one we suggest). If you do not follow these recommendations, then FruitJuice will recommend you perform a Maintenance Cycle. If you do run a maintenance cycle, you will not see another one for at least 30 days.

FruitJuice 2.0 coming soon to the Mac App Store!

FruitJuice 2.0 will be published to the Mac App Store soon!

Many great new features, fill out the form on the home page and we’ll let you know when it’s available.

FJ Team

Why does Max Capacity sometimes go down after a Maintenance Cycle?

When you run your battery through a calibration/conditioning cycle, sometimes there is a decrease in reported capacity.

This is because, as the battery ages, there is a decrease in capacity! Notebook batteries, like other batteries, do have a limited lifespan.
[Read more…]

Charge Indicator Stays Amber, Won’t Turn Green

That is, why does the light not turn from amber to green even if the battery should be fully charged?
Some batteries may not appear to be charging properly (i.e. they are “stuck” at a certain percentage or don’t reach “green light” fully charged status).
A System Management Controller (SMC) reset is likely in order:

FruitJuice 1.0.16 Update Now Available

We’ve just posted a small update (v1.0.16) which addresses the following two items:

[Read more…]

FruitJuice now ready for Mountain Lion and GateKeeper

We are both relieved and happy to announce that FruitJuice is now ready for Mountain Lion and its new GateKeeper security controls.

For those of you already running FruitJuice, we thank you for your support.

For those of you who downloaded FruitJuice for the first time using Mountain Lion, we apologize for not being ready for that until today. [Read more…]

FruitJuice 1.0.14 Update Now Available

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 1.0.14 of FruitJuice. It has a combination of fixes that we have been working on for quite some time as well as some user-reported issues and suggestions. The complete list of fixes follows. [Read more…]

FruitJuice 1.0.13 Update Now Available

We’ve just posted version 1.0.13 to resolve an issue that some users were having during a calibration/conditioning. It would result in the calibration/conditioning appearing to function properly, but no notifications would be sent.

Recommended for all users.

FruitJuice 1.0.12 Update - Let’s Crash One More Time…

We’re both happy, and embarrassed at the same time, to announce the availablility of FruitJuice version 1.0.12. A fair number of users running Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) were experiencing crashes during the update process. Like many Mac software developers, we use the excellent Sparkle update framework to perform secure updates to our software. We messed up because we missed the fact that the source code for Sparkle was moved to GitHub. The latest source on GitHub fixes the Lion crash on update. We’re sorry it took us so long to realize this.

So, go ahead and (possibly) crash one more time applying this latest update. After that it should update without a hitch.

FruitJuice 1.0.10 Update Now Available

We’re sorry that we messed up with the 1.0.9 release last week. We’ve gotten things sorted out, fixed one additional user-reported issue and are happy to announce that version 1.0.10 is now available.

[Read more…]