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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

A couple thoughts, as someone who has used f.lux for years and loves what it does:

1. It's a feature, not a product. And a simple one, conceptually. As much as I'd love to have competition in apps offering this functionality (like keyboards), "make my screen more red" isn't exactly rocket-science.

2. It's not well-designed. Their messaging mixes up two very different use-cases: matching the color of your room and aiding your sleep. That's ok - I use it for both - but there's no way to customize it. Even a super-simple option would let me communicate that I only want it on after 10:30 pm, a couple hours before I go to sleep, when I darken my room. Instead I need to deal with it automatically turning on every day at 4:30 pm, which makes something that should be simple very cumbersome (I have to manually turn it on and off every day in the winter).

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Isn't your #2 point the rebuttal of your #1 ?

If you feel flux is bad designed, lacks options that you need, and needs to evolve into something that behaves smarter; perhaps we can agree the problem is not just 'make my screen more red'

You present your case as a simple tweak, there will definitely be thousands of people who also need a 'super-simple option' (I read it in my mind as "Just add a setting!"), so I guess finding good defaults and packing enough flexibility without a twelve pages setting screen would also be non trivial but appreciated.

I'm saying, recognizing that what we want from something like flux can be as complex as we want it to be, and developing an ecosystem of those would be interesting and hopefully very beneficial to everyone.

It's not that I want more features per se, but I want sensible ones. The way f.lux works is worse than a featureless alternative in many ways; it's like an alarm that's hardcoded to go off at sunrise every morning. Flux.s' stated purpose doesn't match up with its functionality, and there's no flexibility to get around that.

Offering up a loaf of bread pre-sliced isn't rocket science either, but someone has to have the idea first, and executed it in a way that other people say "Wow why didn't I think of that before." or "Huh, I could really find this useful."

At the very least Apple could offer acknowledgement.

Tweaking color temperature has been done in Hollywood since... well, color. You won't see a window on a set that hasn't been treated to balance indoor and outdoor light. Tinting flashbulbs is common. Film editors select different bulbs and gels in tiny cubicles during late night razor-and-tape editing sessions. When video got popular in the 70s, they nudged the tint control. Mid-80s Amiga video games shifted from day to night -- shadows too! TVs ship with day/night/game modes. 10 year old car navigation systems automatically switch colors at night. There's literally nothing new under the sun.

EDIT: yes, you can convert light to orange. http://www.hurlbutvisuals.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/0...

>Tweaking color temperature has been done in Hollywood for nearly 100 years

Then why was it impossible to do on iOS (iPhones and iPads) since 2007?

I find it alarming that so many folks are supporting the actions of a company to control and inhibit innovation, literally hurting consumers' health in the process, in order to control and maintain their forced 30% cut of third party program revenues.

They have literally implemented Palladium and Trusted Computing and it looks like people cannot get more of it.

No they haven't. There's no TPM in modern Apple computers of any brand. And there's certainly nothing like the NGSCB Nexus, which I'd think essential to calling something "literally Palladium."

There's a TPM-like mode with hardware isolation built into ARM for years, used for disk encryption keys, DRM, auth keys, fingerprints, etc on IOS and Android. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_execution_environment

The secure enclave on iOS devices is basically a TPM. See https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

>Then why was it impossible to do on iOS (iPhones and iPads) since 2007?

Just because nobody had baked the feature in.

It was also impossible to have a screensaver on iOS, but this doesn't mean screensavers are a new thing.

My grandparents had a TV from the 1970s, possibly 1960s, that would automatically adjust the color balance to match the room lighting. It really is an old idea.

Shipped on LCD TVs from multiple manufacturers in 2008, too: "new TVs automatically tweak their on-screen colors to complement say, the orange glow of incandescent lights in the evening or the bluish tint of midday sunshine." Six months before F.lux shipped.

http://www.popsci.com/tested/article/2008-06/tuner-tv

And open themselves up to a lawsuit? Nope. Just keep pretending like it's obvious. Even though we've had blue-tinted screens for decades and no one came up with a similar feature.

Backlit displays have only replaced CRTs in the last 10 or so years. I don't recall old monitors having a problem with being blue.

They had. In the 1990's I worked frequently into the night and owned a CRT with color profiles. After the sun went down, I switched to a more warm profile.

Offering up a loaf of bread pre-sliced isn't rocket science either

True, and trying to sell a "bread slicing" service, as a separate product to selling bread, is very obviously going to fail as soon as bakers buy bread slicing equipment. f.lux are trying to sell bread slicing, not bread.

Try tranquility, it's even more aggressive than f.lux, and FOSS.

https://github.com/lswank/Tranquility

(OS X only.)

Maybe you could try Redshift. It might be more customization because, well, open source. I could be wrong, though.

http://jonls.dk/redshift/

I tried to address #2 on their official forum and I was disappointed when the response was, essentially, "you're using it wrong."

f.lux is just a feature, not a product.

Browsers are just a feature, not a product.

Applications are just a feature, not a product.

Operating systems are just a feature, not a product.

Depending upon your POV, just about everything can be dismissed as "just" a feature.

Until f.lux becomes a platform just like browsers, applications (see Photoshop) and operating systems, yeah... it's just a feature.

No one is writing stuff for f.lux.

No, it's an application. Applications aren't necessarily platforms. By your logic, Super Meat Boy is a feature.

Well, you can take it to ridiculous levels calling everything "just a feature".

But that doesn't change the fact that some things, like word count or auto-adjusting color temperature, are at the end of the feature-product spectrum, and are better off as "just features".

That doesn't mean someone can't try to sell a dedicated program based on just those things.

But nobody should be surprised if other programs or OSes incorporate the same stuff as merely a feature they offer.

I aggree but was amused to find and actual word count "product": https://github.com/guardian/gu-word-count

That's from the Guardian newspaper -- it's their word count component from their online site that they give the source as open source.

If you set you location to something closer to the equator and west a few time zones, it will be later and more consistent.

Dimming with the sun just contributes even more to SAD in the winter.

You can set f.lux to start dimming 10 hours before you wake up by selecting 'working late' from the dropdown menu in preferences and by setting the time in '7:00 is when I wake up'. I think the option has been there since 2014. Very useful currently when the sun sets before 4 p.m. :)

re: point #2 - that's basically why I stopped using it, I found myself annoyed by it too much, so I just turned it off.

At least I can set my own time zone in my flux, so couldn't you just set yours to different so it only darkens after X o'clock?

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