Create a shortcut for even lower phone brightness
practicalbetterments.com
practicalbetterments.com
Currently, I've got it set to put a reddish-orange cast on the screen - like a "turbo night shift" more similar to the depth F.lux will let you take your mac. You can use the Shortcuts app to create a shortcut to enable the filter, and then set that to turn on at certain points, so around 10 at night my phone goes from normal night shift to a much more aggressive red/orange-shifted profile. The effect at night is dramatic - the phone becomes much less jarring to look at. The OLED screens are great for this, too - a reduction in blue color is a reduction in blue light. The shortcut turns itself back off at 6am.
The other filter you can apply is a black & white filter, which removes all color from the screen. Give this a try for an hour and then turn it off - you'll be amazed at the riot of attention-grabbing color app makers are throwing at you. I've found it's a lot easier not to get sucked into the phone hole when the UI is set to black & white - the whole device feels calmer and less urgent.
If you haven't spent time in the accessibility settings, though, go exploring. It's where Apple puts all the good stuff.
However, I stick to using the Blue Light Filter Android app, which is amazing. Not sure if it's available for iOS.
I try and use it most of the time, and the shortcut makes it easy to see things in colour if needed.
(oh, and yeah, it does work nicely with B&W mode and blue light filter modes - all 3 are quite helpful for reading in bed without staying up too late)
I'm not surprised the good features are hidden behind Accessibility. I'd argue most other features on a phone are designed for someone else's benefit. Albeit cleverly disguised as benefits for the user.
While sloped, level curb cuts at intersections have been implemented primarily for accessibility legislation compliance, it turns out they are useful not only for the disabled but for people with strollers, heavy bags, etc. A similar effect can also be seen with the modern ubiquity of closed captioning.
So clearly affordances to assist the disabled are going to benefit everyone ... eventually.
MS also had a very interesting design for disability brochure that talked about how even a "regular" person can be temporarily disabled - eg if you're holding a heavy bag of groceries, opening a door that needs 2 hands is very difficult. Designing for amputees will also help the 99% of the population doing grocery runs.
You’re designing for the interface/usage pattern, not so much a specific disability. A curb cut is a usage pattern for anything with wheels. A greyscale mode is a usage pattern for anyone that wants/needs information conveyed without relying on colour distinctions.
Tons of those adaptions are just plain useful in cases outside disability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_paving
Anecdotally, I've observed that elderly people with grocery carts and people in wheel chairs have difficulty at cross walks navigating these features. The wiki mentions these points:
"...more thought should have been put into balancing the needs of vision-impaired pedestrians and mobility-impaired pedestrians, such as wheelchair and cane users, who can trip on the bumps."
I keep:
- a carefully curated list of high-quality channels on youtube (on newpipe, so no tracking and no echo chamber personalised recommendations)
- a carefully curated list of high-quality subreddits
- hackernews
And that's it. Just cut off the junk, grayscale wont save you
> - a carefully curated list of high-quality subreddits
> - hackernews
So you're not removing all social media from your phone?
And I guess not having color for videos is maybe the point, but I can't manage to use it at all if I can't watch videos with color.
It's no problem creating a weird workaround for the other 1/1000 items.
Just stop
You mean like iPhone's Control Center, which is a pull up? There's a large, very clear screen brightness widget...
> Meanwhile, my husband as never been able to locate any of these in an iPhone without the help of this thread.
Aside from the fact that I believe night shift is on by default:
You long press the screen brightness slider (long presses are a common UI function...) and boom, there's two buttons for dark mode and night shift, and below night shift it says "off until (time here")
Or you can type in "night" into the system-wide search and "night shift" pops up as an option?
Or you can google "night mode iphone"?
Your husband being completely helpless isn't the fault of iOS.
For years I've had "make the screen red" as a shortcut to three home button rapid presses.
> Apple products just make no sense to me.
I'm using an iPhone that cost me $300 used when I bought it several years ago, is now six years old, was until a month or so fully supported OS-wise and will continue to get security updates for another year or two, and is plenty fast enough for everything I do. Airdrop is incredibly handy, almost daily, and has no equivalent on the Android side. It backs up automatically to my mac any time it's on wifi and has power, also no equivalent on Android. I have a ton of the data collection turned off in the privacy tab. Half my apps don't know my real email address because I use Apple's email proxy service. iOS integrates nicely with my open-source self-hosted file sync and my open-source password database. The apps on my device collect a lot less data about me, and my device is not incessantly reporting everything it can to Google.
The battery is original and has 75% of its capacity, and battery life is generally excellent. Not a single component in the phone has needed replacement / worn out. The screen is great. The speakers are great. Reception is great. Facetime audio calls are really pleasant with a couple of friends compared to regular phone calls. It never crashes. The Lightning jack still works perfectly, for example - and I don't bother with wireless charging most of the time.
I get that it's nice to prop up one's ego thinking that you're *so much smarter than millions of people who are willing to pay a premium for something, or you can accept that there's a reason people make a choice other than what you do, that they might be different reasons, different priorities, etc.
It can be hard to operate if you turn the blue leds off entirely but you don’t need much.
https://www.blockbluelight.com/blogs/news/how-to-turn-your-i....
Do the filters you're suggesting also tint the keyboard?
Plus, on Pixels at least, there is a setting for Extra Dim (in accessibility settings) which can also probably be set via Macrodroid/Tasker. May need the ADB hack to allow system setting changes though.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.llamalab.a...
I have it set it to "Tap Accessibility button", which is a small person-shaped icon that sits at the very bottom right of my screen, to the right of the Back button.
This is one of the many areas that Samsung phones suck. For many versions, and for older phones that are mostly stuck on those versions, they hide this Android feature entirely. I managed to get it sort-of working by figuring out the intent name and making a shortcut for it in my launcher. (If you have a brand new Samsung, I don't think this is an issue.)
Didn't realize it was a Pixel thing... such a basic feature.
I suspect that the light of a phone screen matters less than the content you view on the phone.
The screen on my eReader is a way better shape than any phone when it comes to reading books. Add to that the fact they cost a fraction what a phone costs and can't possibly send a notification to keep you awake makes them the superior falling asleep device for me. I also don't need any weird hacks like this to make the screen really dim.
Here are my design/dev notes:
https://untested.sonnet.io/Obsidian+for+Vampires
https://untested.sonnet.io/Night+Rider
The idea to work on this was partially inspired by stargazing apps, e.g. NightSky.
I'm still not 100% if these experiments are worth pursuing (I need to pay rent) but if you'd like to see a tool like this, or if you have any use-cases I didn't mention, please let me know.
Would really help working late at night
To use it, I think you just need to start Lunar, and then press the Reduce Brightness button on your keyboard until it goes below the minimum Mac allows.
But I still like this over flux and the likes
Edit: I don’t make a habit of looking at my phone in bed. In addition to the “blue light” there are other things that contribute to wakefulness, such as any voluntary muscle movement (scrolling and tapping) and even just keeping your conscious brain active, which I find I do when I’m interacting with my phone.
f.lux on Windows and Mac, and Twilight on Android, are what work for me.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...
Did you read the article? It’s about a specific accessibility setting that many won’t have thought to use for this purpose.
Pixels that are driven by real hardware and software will be limited in how dim they get.
It only works for reading ebooks (or whatever you can open in the app), which IMO is a huge benefit. I don't want to be scrolling nonsense websites in bed, but I do think a smartphone ebook reader is the least-bright, most comfortable and most ergonomic way to read in bed.
The default brightness of a phone is several hundred nits where the sun is 1.6 billion nits.
Maybe they mean, "brighter than daylight ambient light levels indoors"?
The closest I can get to 'off' is this ridiculous setting: Very dim display (for dark rooms).
They want a minimum that is visible, even during the day, so people don't think their phone is broken.
Then a 2nd shortcut to reverse everything back to how I like it in the daytime.
If you want to mess with just ringtone volume, should be doable via Tasker or maybe even the built in Routines
Moto phone have actions in built where if one puts phone upside down and phone goes on silent
There you can set the per channel volume with 2 digits, giving you 10 steps extra between 0 and 1, as well as balance.
If anyone has ideas how to do this without root, get around the issue of calls being lower volume or remove the dependency on tinyalsa and termux, I'm all ears.