F.lux v4
justgetflux.com
justgetflux.com
I wanted to say that we stopped thinking of f.lux as a way to match a room about 8 years ago. We have been consumed with the idea that if the human circadian system is controlled by light, and if nobody knows what the numbers are in real life, then it is vitally important that we figure it out.
Our main effort since then has been about people and understanding how they react to light over time, and how technology can fix it. f.lux is intended to be a seed that will explain how all of our lighting can work better. It's a big project that extends beyond screens, and we think software is central to fixing the problem.
People who wake up at the same time need different timing and amounts of light, and it's not really about matching the color of a screen to a room. We've learned that almost every room is already too dim (during the day) or too bright (at night). And the trouble is that most people can't figure this out by looking around - they need some tools to help out.
This system that controls sleep and alertness is nonvisual, which means that everyone's intuition about what looks good might be pretty far off from what it does to your body. This certainly is borne out by the last 100 years of electric lighting.
Electric lighting has shifted sleep schedules by >4 hours, and people are not sleeping nearly as much as a result. We think this is connected to ADHD, cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, mood disorders, and many other serious problems.
So while it is true that other people have turned screens orange like f.lux did in 2009, the truth is we didn't do nearly enough back then. Our goal is to understand the biology and make something that actually works for a wide variety of people.
We have tried to address this question ("people, not screens") in little pieces, e.g., why we are making big changes to f.lux's schedule default settings on our "big update" page:
https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/v4/bigupdate/
But it is hard to talk about outcomes when nobody at all expects you to be thinking about them. Snake oil is not what we're about.
We have a lot of work to do -- apparently including a lot of writing and explaining, and I appreciate your support.
Is there an easier way to handle this? Perhaps some way to tell flux "I just woke up" and have it figure things out? Hook into a sleep tracker like on fitness trackers or Sleep as Android?
Seriously thank you so much for this project and all the effort that's gone in so far. I've been using it since about a month after first release and I cannot imagine using a computer without it.
That's funny. All I want is having nice, soft colours when I'm up all night.
But imagine you get a job that requires you to be up at 8AM (and you want to take it). Do you have control of that part of your biology or does it have control of you?
The theory is that your environment is one of the major things controlling your biological timing, and the indoor spaces at least are ones we built so we should understand what it takes to change them.
I've personally found that I have a pretty heavy degree of control over it via the orexin† pathway: if I force myself to wake up and eat immediately for a few days at 8AM, then my body will associate 8AM with eating and shift everything else around (when I get hungry; when I get tired at night; etc.) to ensure I'll be wide awake at 8AM to "catch that meal" (that in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness was probably a rabbit or something.)
One thing I've never figured out though, what's f.lux's business model? You two seem to be investing considerable resources into all of this for years on end, is it all charity?
In any case, thanks!
Ios night shift isn’t nearly as good, and jailbreaking ios is much harder than formerly.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23604485
E.g. meal timing might help you deal with jet lag, but remember that the primary problem in jet lag is the phase-shift of light in the first place.
I suspect eating times are involved as well..
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207513
https://www.howtogeek.com/302186/how-to-enable-night-light-o...
Night Shift is a simple concept and there’s not a huge amount of different ways to do it. It’s something I consider analogous to copy and paste, a trashcan, or a clock in your dock.
When a small business has an idea it is their whole world. They think about it day and night and have to constantly improve upon it or die. A small idea can sustain a small business. A small idea to a large corporation though is a blip on the radar, and so has little incentive to continue being improved. This is now a tiny feature in a big company, mainly added for a keynote announcement and for marketing purposes, with little value to their bottom line down the road.
Prediction: Going forward I expect NightShift to improve at about the same rate as Finder.
F.lux was out for years before the big players finally realized what a good idea it was. It was copied without the slightest attribution or thank you. It may be legal, however not very ethical and rather dishonorable if you ask me. This path leads to a future where only big players exist. Invention by individuals is disincentivized if it will just get copied at the first sign of success.
That's not right. Apple also many times doesn't not iterate as much as the independent developer would. But they do effectively kill off the small guy's work nonetheless.
That doesn't sit right with me.
Regarding ideas. People say that about so many things especially with features the big guys take. With hindsight it is done even more.
Long-time Mac users have a term for this: Sherlocking[0]
It seems far more likely that a company without an obvious business plan might run out of money trying to sell software that seems to be an unnecessary duplication of features built in to the OS than for Apple to eliminate a feature they've only recently introduced and promoted.
I'm hoping neither happen, and I wish the f.lux team the best, but I definitely think you have the odds the wrong way around.
[0] https://carpeaqua.com/2013/10/18/stop-sherlocking-yourself/
The short of it is that, for me at least, NightShift is almost useless. It simply does not get red or dim enough if I'm reading right before bed. Same thing goes for Android, which is why I have Twilight still installed there. Seems like such an easy option to make the color temperature more customizable, so I think it sucks that Apple didn't do this.
Thanks for the recommendation!
If you use Windows 7 you have to go third-party.
The older iOS also doesn't have it.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207513
MacBook models from early 2015 or later
MacBook Air models from mid 2012 or later
MacBook Pro models from mid 2012 or later
So, what's the deal? How's it working on yours?
Not everybody is on Sierra yet. My work laptop still runs El Capitan.
Edit: also android and ios
Configurable in System Preferences -> Displays.
> general quick disable
There’s a toggle in the Notification Center, at the top (may have to scroll/pull down.)
> Configurable in System Preferences -> Displays.
The whole problem is that it isn't configurable to get as warm as many people (myself included) prefer.
If you have any trouble sleeping at night, I'd highly recommend trying one of these strategies. My orange goggles made their way into my digital nomad one bag, they were so useful for my sleep. Occasionally I'd actually sleep in them.
If you want to get really crazy, you can order a bit of a material called "rubylith" (just do a Google search for it) and put it over your laptop or phone screen. It makes things really red, but if you are just reading your Kindle books in bed it can really help prevent staying up until 2am on accident.
I gotta get me those goggles...
With the advent of artificial lighting, we started delaying our dim-light melatonin onset (DLMO). It most strongly responds to blue light, but it does respond to other wavelengths, too, so some people find that any light is too much.
Re fire, another thing that’s helped me is using candlelight in the evening. It keeps things darkish (and of course it’s a warm color of light).
no phone home/automatic updates (plus it's open source)
RedshiftGUI.
Small, portable, sometimes a bit buggy but absolutely irreplaceable.
There's also a .NET based one, but it's so slow it feels like you are starting Photoshop, so it's crap IMHO.
I never bothered to install it again because I realized I did not gather any benefits from it.
Does that mean I can’t adjust the preferred temperature at night if it’s currently day time? If so this is a huge regression. If not, the two sentences are badly worded. I already find the current f.lux interface badly designed[0] and this might just make it worse.
[0]: First, its main interface has a slider and a button group below it. That makes no sense because the button group affects what settings the slider display. It really should be a tabbed region enclosing the slider instead. Next, options like “fast transition,” “sleep in on weekends” really shouldn’t be placed in the menu bar. It makes the initial setup a lot more troublesome, and really makes no sense given you already have a window to configure it. And some options aren’t really clearly described in the first place.
Most likely the combined settings of some combination of my wake time and/or daylight savings time has something to do with it. I'm not sure. But before this last update, it always "just worked". And now that is no longer true.
That said, I still deeply miss the long-dead Nocturne for its “night vision mode”, which was perfect for working in the dead of night. Closest I can find to a good description: https://lifehacker.com/259154/enable-night-vision-mode-with-...
I don't know if it's just me, or if it's just a trend marketed by pseudo-science claims.
It's not pseudo-science, and I'm not even sure why you said that. There's quite a bit of literature at this point demonstrating that the suprachiasmatic nucleus (the primary timekeeper of the body) is heavily entrained by specialized retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), that are most sensitive to blue wavelengths.
Here's a publicly-accessible review paper if you wish to learn more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254760/#BX1
I suppose that may affect sleep patterns in the short term but after several years of using exclusively 6500K lighting I don't have any problem falling asleep after turning-off the bedside lamp even though there's no graduated transition from 'blue' light to darkness.
I can't say I notice if it helps me sleep better, but I definitely find it much easier on the eyes.
When I found f.lux, those went away immediately.
The scientific ideas behind it regarding sleep sound likely, but honestly if they were all proven to be crock tomorrow I'd still use it to ease my eye strain because it clearly can do that.
(E.g. on macOS and iPhone you can simply just set the daily time when Night Shift activates.)