Show HN: Lunar XDR Brightness control

A softbox could be used as a key light, and often is, but it’s classically more appropriate to use as a fill light.

Soft light (which a softbox ideally creates) is defined by diffuse shadows. Perfectly soft light would cast no visible shadows.

An important creative job of the key light, which is called such because it’s the main source of illumination in a scene, is to create a sense of depth by casting shadows onto the 3D objects, giving our brain cues on how to translate them from 2D space into an accurate mental image. Usually harder lights (meaning those with sharper, more defined shadows) are used for the key to create this depth, then the fill light, well, fills in these shadows with additional light to walk them back, which is why soft lights are appropriate there.

As with all creative rules, exceptions abound. Maybe you could make a virtual lighting portrait studio, have sharp white light on one part of the screen, then some sort of gray gradient on the other to fill in some shadow. Unfortunately, that would be most effective if they had a big curved screen and they were willing to sit very near to it :)

I think when they're used for lighting the subject's face it's typically a Key Light, but Facelight works just as well :)

> 1. If most of the screen is not full bright white, (e.g. white text on dark background), then LEDs will have plenty of time to cool down

Note that the display is not an OLED display, but a regular IPS LCD with local dimming zones for the backlight[1]. Thus only the dimming zones not covered by white text would get to cool off.

This also points to another downside of pushing up the nits: it will likely increase the bleed-through of the backlight, driving up the black level especially in white-text-on-black scenarios.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/pro-display-xdr/specs/

What makes it look terrible? The majority of consumer displays max out at 300-400 nits. This is the whole point of HDR, webpages are not designed with “sunlight-white” intended for the background.

I never thought this would become relevant in a context like this, but here it is, and it is painfully relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMSV4OteqBE

I have a Samsung monitor that does this too, but it has an override in its menus. In normal mode it’s stupidly dim. HDR looks like shit, so I just want SDR with proper brightness.

All of their phones take HDR videos and images.

That makes sense. I think the reason I was confused is that when you first open the app, it shows the preference windows, so I tried to set the brightness below 0 in that window. It didn't work, so I checked Allow brightness to reach zero. I then tried the keys and it didn't work due to me having checked that option. I then unchecked it while trying to figure it out... And eventually saw the screenshot on your site where the user is interacting with the icon in the menu bar) which is how I got it working.

Congrats on cracking whatever privateframework to make this work!

I went from macbook to a raised, close-face Linux tablet for my outdoor computing setup (and have been thinking about hi brightness since the MSI Creator 17 and iPad pro 12" came out last year).

Encourage sharing a photo of high brightness outdoors botanical garden computing on https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/

There has to be dozens of us. I also work in the Denver Botanic Gardens, so nice.

As an aside, does anyone know what's up with the linguistic difference between Botanic and Botanical -- Gardens --... are both correct? When speaking, all my friends say "botanical gardens" but every gardens I've been to says "botanic gardens" on the placard.

> You can finally go outside and work on your laptop in the bright sunlight without squinting! You probably don't do this often, but it's nice to have, right

Dear god, is this what laptop makers think too? I want a laptop to use in the sun outside. I actively look for a laptop that does that, but they're either super expensive and/or super ugly.

Is it bad for your eyes? How does looking at an extra bright screen compare to looking at white paper in sunlight? I can imagine it is no problem to eyes adapted to the sun, but maybe there is a difference between emitted light and reflected light?

And do you think it is safe to the screen? I heard that the screen will throttle itself at low-level when overheating anyway. (Edit: saw you answered it somewhere else in the thread!)

Really excited to do a bit of coding in the garden now, but I'm worried for my eyes and my new MBP :-D

This isn't true — the native 1600 nits mode only uses 1600 nits for HDR content. Regular content/OS UI/etc is still limited to much less brightness.

Check out this HDR YouTube video at this timestamp to see how bright white actually is at 1600 nits:

https://youtu.be/NlAsAuBtmps?t=180

Here's a photo of my XDR display with a pure white rectangle in Figma next to white content in an HDR video, with the display set to the 1600 nits mode:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmvu6r6vugaxg95/xdr-brightness-com...

Many. For a lot of laptop models, you can remove the bezel around the display and unscrew the display from the topcase. That allows you to upgrade/replace panels as-needed. Apple notoriously builds their displays directly into the topcase, which means that when your display malfunctions, or the screen cracks, you generally have to replace the entire top component instead of just the broken part. That's why anything "breaking above the hinge" on a Macbook will run you $600+ to fix no matter who you're paying to replace it.

My Dell Precision. I've had it replaced twice under warranty. Don't recommend

Also whether you're wearing your blue light defense moisturizer (context - https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-10-20-streamer-valky...)

Ah so it's not taking screenshots continuously and rendering them into an HDR video?

> If the source code (or at least a significant portion of it) is available under a OSI approved license then it’s Open Source.

It's the part in brackets I disagree with... If a significant portion of a piece of software is available under an OSI approved license, then a significant portion of it is open source.

It's still wrong to call the product open source, because "the product" includes integral parts that are not open source.

What percentage of code is needed for you to call something open source?

    If not all the source is available they should probably say it’s “partially Open Source” to be better citizens.

Indeed, sounds like you also agree with not calling this open source then?

If you can't build it from source, then it doesn't qualify as open-source to me. If they eventually decide to make the "free" version compile, then I'll be fine with them calling it open source (even if paid features aren't available). However, until then, a more apt description seems like "an open component of a proprietary application"

Here is a free (as in) beer, except for the molecules contributed by the hop, those are 2$ a per glass of beer.

Just to clarify, I am okay with paid software existing. It is even better if you share (parts of) the source code to the community in a permissive license. But unless your incentives are aligned with community, I would be crystal-clear and not advertise it as open-source.

Your incentives aren't aligned with the community. Should a free, open-source alternative to Lunar exist with all its features, your sales would go down. It is in your best interest to:

    1. Create the best possible product that works the fastest, smoothest, without bugs, etc.  
    2. Create a minimal viable free product maximizing the amount of new trial users for Lunar.  
    3. Maximize the difference between the free and premium product to convert the most users from #2.

Open source contributors shares incentive #1 with you. They don't share incentive #2, but there's no conflict here. But incentive #3 directly clashes with those of an open source contributor if only the free product is open source.

I want to assume good intentions here, because the malicious interpretation would be that one wants to take advantage of the open source community by getting free work done on incentive #1 while rejecting anything that would cross incentive #3.

So what is your goal? You obviously want to make money - we all do. What else? Is your goal to give to the open-source community for similar applications that wouldn't directly compete with you? It's noble, but risky, as you can't enforce that. If your goal is to conduct a 'business transaction' with the open-source community: "access to my source code in exchange for potential contributions under conditions w.r.t. incentive #3", that's fine too. But that is not open-source.

If you simply publish the source code explicitly stating that parts of the source code of Lunar is available under a permissive license, that you only merge contributions that fix bugs or add pre-approved features, but otherwise people are free to do with it what they want, I don't have a problem with it. But calling it open-source is misleading in my opinion.

> This allowed other apps like MonitorControl [1] and DisplayBuddy [2] to port some Lunar features (like DDC on M1) to their own code. So I'd say it's still useful enough.

When I was trying to do some iOS dev, I basically noticed that having open source or even open core projects accessible for free helped a lot. It ranged from some hard-to-google things, like "how should I structure this part of the code", to fulfilling the utter lack of good documentation.

So, thank you for releasing this!

I'm not sure if it still holds, but Blink app (for ssh, €21) could be built yourself, but I still paid for it because it seemed easiest. So there is some possibility to keep source open while offering a paid app. Not everyone is going to bother to build it.

Throwing my 2 cents my issue is with that

>> Lunar can't be built from this repo yet as the source code for the paid features is hidden

This is where I feel a bit insulted. As long as you have stubs (as you say you will write) for the non-free parts, I can accept the reasoning. But an unbuildable repo is not a repo, in my view. I am not going to argue semantics here but this is the problematic part, for me. I think that after you publish the stubs it can be called an "open source Lite version" - but before that, it's just "unbuildable code taken from your real code"

Your software looks amazing, unfortunately I use a Windows computer at work. What’s the best equivalent?

> Not every open-source project accepts contributions. This is something that you just interpret into "open source", but was never part of it.

I do interpret it into it, as do many others. But not everyone. Stallman and the people at GNU have fought against the term "open source" for a long time, precisely because people have different ideas of it: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

> What open source rather means is that you are free to create your own version/forks that you maintain by yourself if you want some personal code included.

That is commonly referred to as free (as in freedom, not price) software, which is the strictest interpretation of open source I can come up with. Note that others have other interpretations of 'open source' that are even more strict (you may only view the source code, for example, or you may modify but not redistribute the code)! I personally don't include 'binary virality' a-la GPL in this strictest interpretation, but again, some do.

Ultimately open source doesn't have one clear definition. In my book it means free software that is developed 'in the open' - accepting contributions from anyone based on merit. A more precise modern term would be FOSS - that is what I understand when I see open-source.

Citizen in what? A free labor pool for billion dollar companies and hustle culture bros who want to rebrand some FOSS and slap a control panel on it for a quick SaaS flip?

FOSS is supposed to be a gift culture. You give back by making your own, fixing bugs, doing volunteer tech support, or yes paying the creators or a company or foundation that pays them. You don't just take and then whine about "gimme my free stuff," but that's the attitude that many people seem to have adopted.

Another thing I really dislike is the ecosystem being dominated by surveillance capitalist companies. They have a vested interest in using FOSS to steer the ecosystem in ways that benefit them and their interests, and I don't like the direction they are likely to take things. Unfortunately they have plenty of money to "dump" high-quality open source on the market in order to exercise leverage over it. This isn't charity. It's a control technique.

I am personally starting to dislike the OSI for pretending these issues don't even exist. If you look at who funds OSI it's completely captured by mega-corporations, mostly in the surveillance capitalist space.

Open source needs a steward that cares about the freedom part more than the free part.

> What would be some good options to get paid for open source?

Many might read this as "good options to get paid money in exchange for open-source source code". Then the answer is simple: you can, but only once. The code is freely redistributable without restrictions by anyone, thus no scarcity that one could get paid for exists after the initial sale (if the sale ever existed).

So I think a better reading of the question is "good options to paid as an open-source developer".

One could have a money pot for certain features of the software (which may or may not be done yet), that interested users can contribute in or outright buy, which you would then develop (or publish). E.g. "I will develop UTF-16 support in FooApp for $5000". This is especially interesting for open-source software used by enterprise. The problem* here is someone else might offer to do it for less (including free). A bad incentive here is that if you also control the "canonical" repository or project, you can reject pull requests for features that you intend to sell.

An alternative is donation-ware, either through the project or directly to you as a person. The problem* here is that whoever controls the landing page of the most popular fork decides where the majority of the donations go to.

Why did I highlight problem with an asterisk in both cases? Because they have a common cause: we would like to think that if we're the original author of a piece of open-source software, we are in some way special. The original, authentic, canonical, "real" software. We deserve to get paid for it, and no one else should. And people tend to agree! But as per my opening paragraph - the exclusivity is inherently gone. So economically, we can't be. And I don't think a good 'solution' for this exists, although I admit I haven't thought about it enough.

"open source" is a term with a very strict meaning. This app does not comply with that meaning for several reasons that he has outlined.

He is not asking for the developer to comply with the term, he is asking for the developer to stop lying.

Those are two separate topics.

Good software is hard, I expect developers to make a living, and have zero expectations of them open sourcing it or distributing it for free. I am happy to pay for useful software and while I think open source is great, I don't veer into "information wants to be free!!1" idealism.

That being said, open source has both formal and colloquially accepted definitions. Not withstanding anything in my previous paragraph, I support holding accountable any entity, large company or individual developer alike, to conform to that notion once they choose to make a claim of being open source.

I. E. You don't Have to make it open source, but if you claim you do, then you actually should :)

"This product is so incredibly amazing that you should be grateful to us that we allow you to use it at all, and not ask any awkward questions about the restrictions we've placed on how you use it" is such a 'Apple' answer :)