Night Shift Mode in macOS Sierra 10.12.4 | Hacker News Reader

Night Shift Mode in macOS Sierra 10.12.4

macrumors.com

114 pointsxrisk65 comments

Is there any evidence for Night Shift/f.lux having impact on sleep? Last time I attempted a review I found plenty of explanations but no evidence.

A PNAS article about the use of e-Readers is often cited [0]. However, this compares a light emitting device to a book, and it's not clear how applicable it is to Night Shift vs. not Night Shift.

There is some research about the affects of light at different wavelengths on the human sleep cycle but I'm wary about using that as evidence for the efficacy of something like f.lux or Night Shift without specific studies done on their use in practice.

[0] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1232.full.html

I think for something as simple as Night Shift, "try it yourself and see" is a valid approach. Even if it's a placebo effect, it's still an effect!

Anecdotally, Flux + Night Shift dramatically improved my longstanding insomnia. But that's just my anecdotal experience

If it helps people to improve their hygiene, by placebo effect or otherwise, then that's a good thing.

However, I ask because I did try it for several months, and did not notice any effect other than the minor irritation of having to keep turning it off when I wanted to watch a film in the evening (and the constant malfunctioning of f.lux – although hopefully those issues would not be present in Night Shift).

I'm not sure I would be able to detect an improvement even if there is one though - there's too many confounding factors. So I'd like to see some evidence so I can make an informed decision.

Yeah, I would be curious to see some real studies on that as well, I suspect that having a bright screen in your face is the problematic part, and that color temperature only make a very marginal difference, if any at all.

But honestly, I use it because I like it, not for any positive effects it may have on my sleep. It just makes it more pleasant to look at screens after nightfall. Also, seeing the screen change is a very pleasant "hey, stop looking at Twitter/HN and go to bed!" reminder.

Flux's biggest benefit for me was just making sleep something I thought about, what really works for me is not using screens for a good bit of time before bed. I can't quantify the days I wake up feeling great very well but I do feel the difference if I go to bed overstimulated from too much time on screens, arguing on the internet or whatever.

Don't know if it has effects on sleep, though anecdotally I sleep very well. However before using f.lux I experienced headaches from time to time after long days in front of various screens. It wasn't a regular occurrence but I'm pretty sure it was related to those long hours.

Since I started using f.lux all day (not just at night) several years ago those headaches have a been a thing of the past - it basically doesn't happen anymore.

I know f.lux is intended to be used in dark environments but since I rarely do color-sensitive work and prefer the lush, warmer color temperature (3800K for me), I see no reason to change my all-day use.

Ganglion cells[0] are sensitive to blue light and produce melatonin, one of the few sleep regulating hormones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsically_photosensitive_r... nal_ganglion_cells

For me, it is not about sleep. If I disable Flux at night, it hurts my eyes.

First iOS 9.3, then Android 7.0, upcoming Windows Insider builds, and finally macOS Sierra 10.12.4. I hope the GNOME/Unity/Cinammon developers start implementing this too. f.lux works as expected, but it starts to get warmer around an hour before my iPhone does. Small issue, I know, but it does get annoying over time.

You may not know: on Unity you can saturate / desaturate the windows. I set them almost black and white and increase the saturation when I need it (shift + brigthness up / down).

I have no idea if it provide health benefits similar to the "orangy filters" but it's pretty nice on the eyes and, personally, it makes me happy to see the outside world with brighter colors than my screen.

HazeOver is an app for macOS that does similar, dimming windows except the active one.

For Linux I suggest redshift [1]. It has been packaged for a long time and works great.

[1] http://jonls.dk/redshift/

Note that redshift currently does not work under GNOME3 when Gnome is running as a Wayland compositor. There is a feature request[1] for integrating this functionality into GNOME 3 (and even a nice mockup[2]).

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=741224

[2] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mo...

There's a Gnome Shell extension that people report works on Fedora 25 with Wayland: https://github.com/benzea/gnome-shell-extension-redshift

If memory serves, redshift is installed by default now with the Cinnamon DE (at least on Fedora).

If you're installing it, make sure to grab redshift-gtk as well, as it adds an icon to the system tray that makes it easy to toggle than command-line switches.

The f.lux effect never looked as nice as the one on Android though - it looks like it just paints over another layer of orange color instead of removing the blue components when rendering. It makes my eyes hurt in the evening in a way that the night mode on my Pixel never does :/

Also it kicks in and gets really strong hours before I go to sleep.

Hopefully Apple themselves will do it better.

As far as I know only Android >=7 on hardware with a HWC 2 implementation support colour transforms [0], so all Android apps implementing a f.lux-style thing do exactly that, draw an orange rectangle over the screen.

F.lux on desktop has always worked that way though, I think. It should essentially be rendering the blue component substantially darker (up to removing it, depending on the temperature setting), instead of alpha blending with orange.

[0] https://source.android.com/devices/tech/display/night-light....

F.lux has no way to do this correctly on Android.

Luckily, since there was a lot of positive feedback to the implementation of this feature in the 7.0 preview, it has been backed at the driver level for 7.1.

Now the feature works perfectly and has no performance impact.

It also opens the door to a wide array of other modifications :

-color adjustements

-temperature shift

- color-blindness compensation

Basically you can apply any matrix you want on the screen output.

If it's getting warm earlier, then try and move your location a bit to the East.

My biggest disappointment with the new Macbook Pro is that it didn't include tunable color temperature for the keyboard. For an iPad, just changing the screen works because that's all it is. When your keyboard is a separate glowing thing, having your screen at 2200K and keys at 6500K looks awful. I used to turn the backlit keys off while running f.lux, but you're stuck with a touch bar at minimum now.

Oh well.

EDIT: Obviously the touch bar is full color and could be shifted like the screen. But because Apple's stance is that it's part of the keyboard, and the keyboard can't shift, I don't think they will. Curious if anyone's tested it though.

If you want you house lights to do the same thing, get some Philips Hue bulbs and this app I wrote: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/circadian-hue-for-philips-hu...

My old office didn't get much external light, so I wrote this app to give me a sense of time of day. Now I have a better office I still use it.

Nice. Would it be easy to port to iOS as well? I reckon that you'd mostly just need to implement the user interface.

Flux has been such a great tool. I love that Apple is copying that functionality and I hope the Flux team understands that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Considering that it's costing them their business and fame, I doubt that they would see it like that.

What is their business? It's a free app. Have they licensed the technology to anyone?

From their website: "f.lux is patent pending". So when they get their patent, they can sell licenses.

Or sue Apple ;)

Considering they’ve both implemented it, I’d guess Apple & Google have either already licensed the tech or decided the patent application has no merit.

Well, given that the Flux team has refused for years to allow us to configure the times and for how long it activates itself, I welcome Apple bringing this to the mac.

I can't understand why this is. Surely it was harder to implement the sunrise sync than a simple time dropdown?

This is the one reason I want to get away from Flux.

Does anyone know what their supposed motivation was for not letting us set the start and end time?

I read the other day a bullshity response in their forums like that their objective was to understand human behaviour not just set timers or something like that.

Edit:

- "Our goal is to further the understanding of human biology, not just turn things orange on a timer. It's a longer term undertaking and a much more difficult one."

https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/237/custom-sunset-sunrus...

Lol. That's indescribably smug.

I always set my location some way to the south west to make f.lux dim later. Sweden in winter may get dark at 3 pm, but that doesn't mean I am going to bed.

I'm glad they added this. I was disappointed that it wasn't in the Sierra announcement. Guess they just needed a bit more time.

I will be glad to finally be able to dump Flux. It's mind-bogglingly insane, but Flux still doesn't allow you to set a custom start and end time. I certainly don't need my screen going orange a full six hours before I go to bed. So I'll be getting away from it onto this official one the day it's available.

I've tweeted them about it a few times, but they don't reply, and it's not open source, so I can't fix it myself.

Plus, Flux is incompatible with fullscreen YouTube on the Macbook Pro, which is a really big problem too.

The newest version finally does, sort of. It supports setting a "bedtime" color (and a custom time) independent of the "sunset" color, so you can have eg. 5500K in daytime, ~3500K in the evening (matching normal interior lighting), and ~2000K when it's actually bedtime. Or just set the same color for the first two.

Has anyone produced a screen that isn't backlit in recent years? I see there's a 13" e-ink display (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/paperlike-world-s-first-e... ) but I don't know if it needs to be e-ink or simply not backlit. I worked last night to candle light and it was lovely; would like to be able to do the same on computer.

Perhaps it's worth finding an old monitor to kill the backlight on to try this out.

You needn't bother. Having repaired a considerable number of displays with dead backlight inverters, I can say from experience that you won't be able to see anything.

(Light has to pass through an LCD in order to produce a perceptible image. Watch displays, pre-backlight Palm devices, non-backlit e-ink displays, and the like do this by reflecting back light that arrives through the screen. Computer displays all but universally do it with a backlight; without one, and without a reflective layer behind the LC layer, you see a blank black rectangle no matter what the crystal layer is doing.)

If they're gonna kill the backlight anyways, I doubt it'd be much effort to put something reflective where the backlight was.

You'd be surprised. Getting good light reflection without also producing an image of the surroundings to conflict with the display is harder than it seems.

Amoled screens can go really dim. As dim as reading by candlelight, while retaining most color detail. But I don't think we will get an amoled computer monitor anytime soon, if at all.

I've used f.lux but the problem I find is that if I'm unwinding in the evening watching some youtube / netflix on my laptop the colour shift is quite annoying.

By contrast, on my iphone I tend to not need accurate colour representation so the recently introduced Night Shift Mode is hardly noticed.

I'd love to see some form of universal dark mode or reverse mode on Macs and ios. Something that reverses backgrounds so I'm reading white text on black background. There are various workarounds, but it would be nice to not have to use them.

You can invert the screen colors.

System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, look under "Accessibility" for "invert colors"

You can also assign this to a hotkey to quickly toggle it on/off.

I've installed a firefox plugin that does this - just a few css rules for background color, text colour, etc. It totally ruins all the designy aspects of the web, but it makes reading a lot less tiring for my eyes.

If you're referring to "Dark Background and Light Text" by Mikhail Khvoinitsky, I can vouch for it. It also works surprisingly well on mobile:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/android/addon/dark-backgrou...

Yes - that's the one. I've set it for the traditional dark background and green text (as I have for terminal, sublime, etc.). Does wonders for the eyes.

This is hardly a scientific review, but I definitely feel like I've started sleeping better since I started using Night Shift on my phone and f.lux on my MacBook. I seem to fall asleep faster and I don't toss or turn as much.

So glad to hear this. I've had so many problems with flux during the past year.

Yeah - display colour is an OS-level concern. This feature belongs in the OS itself.

It's tough to get excited about macOS. F.lux is 7 years old. I am running Yosemite and I have to keep my own installer for new machines & restoration.

I like nightshift, don't get me wrong, but I've never met someone who based their software ecosystem on a vendor provided way to change the color temp...

Nice feature. And at this point i have dilemma, i stopped os x updates after Apple decided to remove remaining battery time. I like f.lux idea, but sometimes have some problems with it, so i would like to test Night Shift. Hope remaining time will return with future update

Do you have any reasons other than having a somewhat decent idea of how much time you have left? Battery power doesn't work on a time basis as power expenditure isn't consistent.

My power expenditure is consistent: Most of the time when I'm on battery I'm typing in Scrivener, which leaves CPU use a flat 0%. (Presuming I've remembered to SIGSTOP Chrome.)

The battery life indicator was reliably accurate. I miss it.

> Do you have any reasons other than having a somewhat decent idea of how much time you have left?

Why do you find this reason insufficient?

>Battery power doesn't work on a time basis as power expenditure isn't consistent

It can be quite consistent if you do very simple things (CPU-wise). SSH-ing into servers and working on them all day is pretty consistent in battery life on my MBP.

iStat Menus and CoconutBattery (to cite two options respectively paid and free) both provide menu bar indicators of remaining time. I've found iStat Menus' very consistent.

https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

iStat Menus includes a battery menu item replacement that will show you the estimated remaining time.

Glad to see this is built in now, very useful on iOS and iOS apps

RIP Flux.

First they killed Flash, now it's Flux's turn.

Flash was so bad that it killed itself. Flux was so good that Apple implemented it. 2 different stories. You could compare this with Alfred though...

True, I was just trying to be funny (didn't work) :-)

Is Alfred really killed? I am still a heavy user, many improvements compare to Spotlight for me.

It sure is not killed by Spotlight, I use many features in Alfred that are not available in Spotlight. Launching applications and doing simple tasks like calculations are possible with Spotlight. Snippets in Alfred work better than the OSX 'text' feature. Alfred with the Powerpack is really great.

Or to Watson (Sherlock/spotlight), Instapaper (Safari Reading List), Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets (Dashboard), SecondBar (menu bars appear on all monitors since Mavericks), or TotalFinder (the Finder has had tabs since Mavericks).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com