Night Shift compared to f.lux
forum.justgetflux.com
forum.justgetflux.com
I live very far north. In the winter the sun is up for just a few hours, and in the summer it's down for just a few. Obviously, I don't want to follow the sun for my sleeping rhythm, and exactly nobody over here does.
Most of the time, I go to bed based on the clock. We use lots of artificial lighting in the winter, and window blinds in the summertime. I'd like to simply configure when I expect to go to bed, and possibly when I expect to wake up. With f.lux, I have to try to find a location on the globe where the sun matches my actual sleeping cycle, and hope that it stays that way (it doesn't).
I did notice that there's a new "far from the equator" setting in the latest version, but I don't understand what it does and how it's supposed to help. Just give me a schedule setting.
They've offered a revolutionary — one that can improve people's HEALTH° — software product at no cost to the consumer. The moment said product reaches peak market interest, one of the biggest companies in the world comes along and snatches it from them. (Disclosure: I don't know if there was a bid made, in which case my argument is weakened.)
So much for "Good artists copy, great artists steal"[0], eh... If you were the 'great artist' in this situation, I don't think you'd sit there without letting off a bit of steam via technically correct public information as to how your product is objectively better (at what it's supposed to do).
°How many software utility companies can say that?!
Thanks for pointing out the flaw in my metaphor. Perhaps a better analogy would've been David v Goliath, but that is so intensely overused these days...
Personally I wont stop using f.lux, what I really like is that I can set custom colours and get a more orange screen even during daytime. I really like the softer colours, even when the sun is up.
For this reason, I actually used a patched version of Redshift back when I was on a Linux desktop. Now I'm on a Mac. I used to run f.lux, until Night Shift came out with the superior scheduling options.
I do believe in the "amount of blue-green light" argument from the f.lux guys, and would like to see a way to configure macOS to almost completely eliminate blue light, like f.lux does. If f.lux were to introduce a simple schedule option a'la Night Shift, I might switch back.
I just checked and mine thinks I'm in South Africa and I'm actually in Europe. No wonder my screen was darkening too early!
Edit: Added specificity.
I mean no harm with my comment; it's made in jest. Hope you don't mind...
redshift has that, and seems to be the popular alternative nowadays (on the desktop).
edit: I don't get the artefacts with NS but I do get the same white border on the mouse cursor after watching a video full-screen for some time
I've had the same issue with an Intel GPU'ed MBPR 13" (ie, no Radeon or Nvidia GPU also), and it rarely happened in OSX, but only during certain HW accelerated overlays (such as YUV acceleration in videos, or OpenGL programs doing sufficiently interesting things).
I don't think F.lux has the bug, but OSX's rendering pipeline does. I had similar issues with color profiles I generated myself that noticeably differed from the screen itself (Apple has yet to produce an actually fucking accurate-to-sRGB screen, I don't care how many Photoshop jockeys praise their lord and savior, St. Jobs).
So, yeah. In other news, my MBPr runs Windows 10 and I'm never going back; and I've also never seen the bug here.
The side effect is: F.lux's Windows version is not feature complete with OSX's, and noticeably redshifts at different times than OSX does depending on what settings you prefer.
But I usually just leave my mouse over the Mac menu bar.
https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/58/strange-colors-blue-f...
(Also if you have an external display connected, "integrated only mode" is ignored in gfx).
It's likely f.lux cannot ever do anything about it. Until Night Shift was available, I've been in the habit of of creating "low color temp" color profiles and manually setting my display to them when it gets late in the day (a crude approximation of f.lux, but ultimately the same thing they are doing). It always produced the same artifact.
Incidentally, I find it strange that f.lux is claiming they output so much less blue light than Apple's Night Shift, since as far as I can tell, all they do is shift the color profile, just like Night Shift does. Anyone who has seen the video issues I'm describing above can attest that there is still plenty of blue light coming out of the screen with f.lux (and manual color profile adjustments). All three accomplish the same thing, it's just that Apple's implementation appears to be cleaner and work in more cases (not surprising -- it's their system, so presumably they know how to integrate with it better than anyone). I think perhaps at most they have a point that the default settings are maybe not "warm" enough, but that's the only flaw I can see.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/videofixer-for-flu...
In the time it took you guys to comment you could have written the user style yourself after looking at the source code.
I cannot believe the degree of cargo culting that goes on on this website around security.
`opacity: 0.996 !important;`
We can find the discussion where the extensions were born https://forum.justgetflux.com/post/10814
Looks like this is something browser vendors should incorporate? One would think that because WebKit is free and open source it should be possible to have this fix evaluated for everyone built into Safari and chrome by default.
Anyway, I guess I'm just another security grump, but knowing it's a single simple CSS property only makes me feel further justified that "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit" is unacceptable. I don't think that's restricted to security nerds on HN either -- there are probably would-be users who can't find a CSS file on Github and translate it into a user style, who will also not install the extension, if that's what Chome tells them it "requires." I don't know if that's purely Chrome's fault for not having an extension architecture capable of requesting less scary permissions to get this job done, or if the developer could do better too.
I can't say it's chrome's fault in this case. The extension is effectively acting on every single web page, even though it's just CSS.
You're right about me being a security nut. But I don't think it is unwarranted to be paranoid about letting an extension have those permissions. Especially when the extension can auto update without my permission. There's no way for me to stop the extension from updating in the options.
You viewed the source code, but the extension checks for an update every couple hours and updates itself. You might trust the developer to not do anything bad, or not accidentally leak his private key for the extension. The only way to stop it from updating itself is to go to the manifest file and removing the update url.
I'm tired of the anti-security comments that come up against people commenting about bad security practices, even though they're restrictive and paranoid. This is the case when you need to be paranoid. A quick google search give me this[1]
Ever let someone's code have access to everything on every webpage, including all of your financial and personal ones you use? Well you're doing it right now. The only way I'd be okay with letting extensions access and change contents of webpages if they specify the website url they're going to access, and those are the only websites they can access (Reddit Enhancement Suite does this)
I appreciate the developer's time on this and don't mean to disparage their effort. But, how many developers are you going to keep trusting this way? You can't normalize every extension having those permissions! Read and change, not just read all websites.
You know enough to look for the source and check it out. But what about the users who don't know how to do so or can't read code? Even if they can, can they discern malicious code from harmless code? Will you say the same thing you said to me to a user with no understanding of how these things work?
I'd actually love to know how you got to the source code in three clicks. Wish it was that easy to view an extension's source other than digging through the chrome internal data folders.
And I don't think cargo culting is the correct term, or bike shedding. I'd say something to do with tin foil hats would be more appropriate.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/google-kills-200-ad...
Yeah, really beggars belief, doesn't it.
Please don't let us security paranoid people stop you from contributing to open source software. And 6k+ users are using it with great reviews so you must already know your work is much appreciated. My gripe was about security practices, not about doubting the security of your specific extension. It is same problem with the way chrome handles all of the extensions' auto-updates.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13984773 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13984661
Although when I think about it, even a style sheet could be malicious to a degree (e.g. hiding important warnings, or adding misleading text)
A) Imagining the video artifacts; and B) Also moving my mouse around to get rid of them
I'm so glad I'm not the only one these past few months!
I filed a bug with Apple on it, and in November of last year they duped it to rdar://22180778 and said to expect a fix in 10.12.4… so I've been waiting eagerly for this update, and it looks like they followed through.
I have been using f.lux for years and it has definitely had a huge impact on me. I don't have any scientific data to back up my claims, but f.lux is a fantastic product.
When you consider that f.lux released a side loading version of their app on iOS and then Apple threatened to remove their developer license, and then after it was pulled, released their own ripped off version of the software that does not work as well, you can understand how they might be upset about that. I understand that is business, but as someone who has used both I find f.lux to be completely superior.
Apple probably should have bought f.lux and then integrated it into their products, but instead decided to do it themselves. I'm not saying the software is earth shattering, but they spent years on the problem, and it feels as if Apple implemented their version in a few days.
I think Apple should open up the screen/display APIs on iOS to allow f.lux and other similar apps to be installed. I would happily pay for it rather than use night shift.
Apple's concern was that f.lux changes the color of the screen outside the app, and that fact alone goes directly against Apple's philosophy of keeping apps in their own respective sandboxes. Only Apple is allowed to change UI outside of an app. Consistency at all costs.
f.lux, while more effective, may be off-putting to most people. The medicinal orangeness was a bit sickening to me when I first tried f.lux, to the point that I didn't want to use it, though I warmed up to it later.
Then I'd turn off flux while they were watching & everybody said the same thing as the screen returned to blue-white: "ewwww."
I thought something was broken, was checking cables, rebooted, etc, until I realized that I'd just never seen what f.lux did at 4 in the morning before. Felt pretty stupid.
Maybe making it easier for new users is what they were aiming for but it's equally likely with the evidence we have (read: zero) that they fucked up because they don't know what they're doing.
Is there evidence to support the f.lux team's claims at being objectively better in "helping people sleep" other than their word for it? Honest question. Edit: I see there's [0] but it's probably best to try out both f.lux and Night Shift on alternate days and decide for yourself what works better for you.
What stopped Apple from copying f.lux's exact behavior, if they wanted to?
We would have to assume that Apple did 0% testing, or received 0% feedback during the time Night Shift has been out on iOS, before bringing it to the Mac. After all they do have experience with researching health and human behavior from their time on the Apple Watch. They could even compare heart rate, movement and sleep data from Apple Watch users and see how it's affected by Night Shift.
That's a pretty bold claim, and it seems far less likely than it being an intentional decision for whatever reason (and making things easier for new users certainly is a plausible reason).
We also have the evidence that they're a huge company, with huge resources, and lots of top talent, that can consult scientists, medical professionals etc for such a feature.
Just because Apple is a big company doesn't mean that all they do are big company things.
And perhaps you've set it to some extreme setting.
Sure, f.lux might reduce blue/green light more at it's default settings, but if it causes me to disable it, it's not actually blocking more light.
The arch wiki[1] has a good entry about redshift autostart as well.
The only other problems I've faced running redshift in the past, were related to geoclue.
Also thanks, uninstalled flux due to annoyance at lack of full customizability over schedules and hue ranges. ended up finding a more general 'display output' modifier, I'll look into this one though.
However, I do think that the transition is sometimes really too quick. I can be working away, deep in 'flow' and I will alarmingly perceive the screen going darker/changing a couple of times over the evening. It almost feel like I am passing out or getting a precursor to a migraine sometimes, with the change, which is quite jarring.
The other thing is the constant annoying notifications of "You are going to be awake in 'x' hours". Well, actually, no - If I am up and coding until 2am, then chances of me being awake at 6am when you expect me to is just not on.
I also wish they would have an 'emergency awake' function, so that when I jump on to the keyboard to fix a server outage at 5am after many hours away sleeping, that it would immediately go to full brightness there and then, rather than wait until 0630 as per normal. If I am active at that time after a long break, I am NOT going back to sleep and I have to have full illumination of all those red signals on my server dashboard! :)
On Windows it actually has a more verbose option saying to transition over 60 minutes. I'm wondering if that's the default, not-Fast-transitions on MacOS?
Disable:
> For an hour
> Until Sunrise
> For current app
It would be nice if f-lux could detect that there is activity after many hours away, and the ambient light in the room is quite high, so let's go "throttles to the firewall" automatically and set the screen back to daylight mode to commence the work day earlier than normal.
i advise you tell the developer!
If the issue is the number of blue photons per square millimeter of our retinas, why isn't it being discussed as such? This means screen brightness and distance from your face would have a much bigger impact than a color filter.
I personally think the f.lux team knows this and that's why their FAQ is devoid of any questions about effectiveness.
FWIW the only person I've known to use f.lux is an insomniac who barely ever sleeps and is always tired.
You acknowledge that blue light does affect our brains and sleep patterns, but then dismiss a solution which limits the amount of blue light while toting an alternative which also acts to reduce the amount of blue light (brightness & distance).
Brightness is meant to apply evenly across the entire color spectrum of a display (it doesn't in reality but that is a convenient fiction without getting into the weeds). Color filters on the other hand reduce the luminosity of only blue light which can be independently measured (see the link).
I know plenty of people who use f.lux and tons more who use Night Shift on iOS devices. My wife is one of them, wakes up in the middle of the night and uses her phone, goes back to sleep a lot sooner after they added Night Shift than before. Obviously all anecdotes are anecdotes but study after study have shown that blue light negatively impacts sleep, and blue filter glasses have been shown by at least one Harvard study to help aleve the impact.
A color filter such as in Flux and NS removes blue light.
>If the issue is the number of blue photons per square millimeter of our retinas, why isn't it being discussed as such? This means screen brightness and distance from your face would have a much bigger impact than a color filter.
No, it doesn't mean that at all.
Or rather, it does, but it's a moot point. All you're saying is: you can reduce blue light with an orange filter, but you can also go away from your screen or dim it so you can't see it. Or even not use a computer at all.
While all of those things hold, the "orange filter" achieves the same thing (removing blue light) without affecting our ability to work regularly on the computer (increased distance, less brightness, etc).
I'm not sure how people come up with such logic errors.
>FWIW the only person I've known to use f.lux is an insomniac who barely ever sleeps and is always tired.
It's not worth much. It's not supposed to cure insomnia (which has 2000+ different causes), just to keep up with the natural light changes and improve sleep.
Although I'm no ophthalmologist, I think this is not likely. AFAIK there are retinal nonlinear cascading effects in the detection of light; if you double the distance, you should get 1/4 the incidental photons, but I think you will effectively perceive a less drastic change in reception than > 1/4 of the light, and so downstream a monotonic smaller difference in circadian rhythm disruption?
> FWIW the only person I've known to use f.lux is an insomniac who barely ever sleeps and is always tired.
They would be better off getting more sleep, but it seems like a distraction to say that because f.lux doesn't cause them to sleep, it's not effective. One could just as readily argue that the people who use it well are unlikely to praise their fine-tuned daily sleep hygiene, or that the insomniac's sleep would probably be worse without f.lux, or that they're a hypochondriac, or that f.lux causes insomnia, or any other similar speculative conclusion..
Why would the f.lux team be hiding any uniquely-possessed information for (experimentally) showing how they have duped their users??
Is it the one perfect way to stop insomnia? Of course not! That is not what it claims to be.
My first days of using Night Shift has worked exactly like that. I don't particularly care about configurability of the tool (I live on a pretty well supported latitude I guess). Moreover Night Shift presents significantly less artifacting in videos based on my brief experience. Transitions are also far less jarring than they are with f.lux.
So yeah, I guess f.lux will be the better choice for those who really care about the details of their blue light filter. Night Shift, like LineageOS' LiveDisplay, Windows' Night Time and GNOME's Night Light, take a simpler approach that will get you 98% of the way there in a few clicks, which should be good enough for most people.
Night Shift's defaults aren't getting you 98% of the way there; they're getting you maybe 15% of the way there.
Bye forever, Flux.
>To be fair, we thought it was pretty easy after our first year making f.lux (Night Shift today looks a whole lot like our first version). We figured we'd solved the blue light problem and that there just wasn't much left to do. We couldn't have been more wrong. Every person has individual needs, and those needs are different based on your sensitivity to light, your own chronobiology (imagine early birds and night owls), your own schedule, and other factors too. Those needs change across seasons, and over your lifetime. Today our approach is different: we are working every day to understand how light affects human biology, not strictly sleep, and we are constantly applying what we learn to updates and new features for f.lux.
[0] - "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....
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/02/gnome-night-light-blue-li...
> Doesn't apply to projectors or TVs
> Doesn't mess with fluidity (turning Flux on or off gives massive framedrops
> Doesn't give weird artefacts on YouTube
Flux devs also ignored all (!) my e-mails about fixing how Flux reads its settings. You can directly edit the settings file via Terminal, but Flux ignores all the values you set and simply sticks to the ones set in the app itself.. even after a restart of the app or a reboot.
I think Nocturne was abandoned long ago. Someone forked and updated it a couple of years ago, but I don't know if it works with Sierra as-is: https://github.com/Daij-Djan/nocturne
For my eyes, the f.lux nighttime adjustment and configurability is great. at work, i use it during daytime hours as well, helps greatly with eye strain.
Night Shift is like an introduction of the concept to a mass audience, surely it has a positive benefit for the uninitiated but there's a lot missing for folks who rely on it. Android is much better with multiple applications available to control this.
I thought it would have been a good gesture for apple to buy f.lux and get the "market leader", and some built in goodwill, as opposed to just copying them, but I guess such is life when you are the largest corporation in the world.
Apple made it, which means that Apple's PR shills & Apple's fanboys think it's revolutionary. These are the same folks who proudly claim that wireless headphones are awesome & losing the escape key is great for vi-users.
Frankly I think theirs are low-signal comments, but … to each his own, I suppose.
1. Doesn't require root.
2. Actually filters blue out, instead of adding red (i.e. a pure black screen should remain pure black).
The built-in feature in Nougat previews was great, until they removed it...
Every application that I've tried so far does this, which leads me to believe that it is an inherent limitation in stock Android APIs (which also explains why apps that require root can work around that limitation).
Hopefully amazon copies that feature for their next one.
I've seen it referred to as RGB LEDs for the backlight, but I think it's more likely to be two-channel mixing with cool white and warm white, as is common on "tunable white" light fixtures. All you get for control is a cool/warm slider or auto, so the hardware is a bit immaterial the average user (though it would affect the blue wavelengths present in the spectrum). I think we have some sort of spectrometer around the office, I'll have to see if I can track that down and check.
Points on black body curve in CIE 1931 colorspace: http://i.imgur.com/FCsdxZW.png
That's the curve where we define "white" light, based on the perceived color of a black body object heated to various temperatures. The naming convention is a bit strange; "warm white" refers to the orange end with relatively cool temperatures, while "cool white" refers to the blue end with relatively high temperatures.
Relative spectral distributions, each normalized with the peak wavelength at 1: http://i.imgur.com/3Bw6ltt.png
The "cool" spectrum is pretty typical of a phosphor converted white LED, where you get a strong peak in blue and then a smooth curve across the upper end of the spectrum produced by the phosphor.
The "warm" spectrum has two peaks, dominated by red around 630nm and a smaller green peak around 530nm.
You can tell just from the black body curve that they've used more than the two-channel LED mixing that I guessed in my parent post. With just two LEDs, you're basically making linear combinations of the two colors and can only move in a straight line between them. If it were only the cool white and red LEDs, the color would move along this path between 6300K white and 630nm saturated red: http://i.imgur.com/d2W3sb4.png
Having a 3rd channel green LED allows them to pull it back up to the black body curve. Interesting to see that they're apparently doing a 3-channel color adjustment with cool white / red / green, rather than the RGB system that people are so used to.
Is there any data to support this?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsically_photosensitive_r...]
Makes me wonder if the placebo effect would come into play here as well.
I would love if Night Shift could just shift the white balance to match the surrounding. Does anyone have experience with True Tone on the 9.7-inch iPad Pro? I imagine would work like that.
I am a lot more concerned about street lights, which are headed in the exact wrong direction: https://www.ama-assn.org/ama-adopts-guidance-reduce-harm-hig...
I appreciate the work f.lux did, but this is going to be a core feature of every OS now, and none of them bought their tech to do it. That is a tough spot to be in, but it is probably time to start winding the project down.
Far less stuttering as well. Whatever f.lux is doing is not worth the janky implementation.
They should have sold it when they could have....
Then one late evening disable it.
Every time I do that it as if I have been hit with full beam car light.
Really shocks me how bright a non f.lux/night shift/redshift screen is without them. I now really struggle to look at a non-adjusted screen in the evenings. And I am glad my eyes don't have that strain normally. I could possibly deal without it on a small laptop screen by just dimming it but need these tools when using my normal home 34" monitor. That is a lot of brightness otherwise.
xcalib -green .1 0 1 -alter
xcalib -blue .1 0 1 -alter