F.lux updated | Hacker News Reader

F.lux updated

justgetflux.com

588 pointsglennericksen248 comments

"A healthy circadian rhythm depends on seeing bright light while you’re awake, not just avoiding bright light before bed"

This statement cannot be emphasized enough. Especially for Hackers and other indoor/Desk bound folks, the amount of bright sunlight exposure is critically important for two reasons:

1) Sunlight is the "moderator" of our circadian Rhythm via Melatonin and other Neuro-chemicals

2) A large percentage of people are Vitamin-D deficient, more Sunlight (on skin) = greater chance of Combating this issue

Taken together, fixing these will resolve many issues..

Looks like the f.lux people agree:

"The sun is up—go outside!" is the message I'm seeing right now in the Preferences. :-)

I moved from a dark to a very bright apartment, and it fixed my sleep problems, except during winter (where there is little sun, as I’m from Scandinavia), to fix that, I try to spend the darker months on the southern hemisphere.

You may consider investing in a natural sunlight lamp.

http://www.amazon.com/NatureBright-SunTouch-Plus-Light-Thera...

Could this explain how moving from my less thick curtains has made me very tired? I used to just wake up at the rise of the sun and felt refreshed no matter what, but now it seems like I never get any good sleep.

Do some A B testing on yourself to know for sure.

In my opinion however, lack of sunlight when waking weighs heavily on ones ability to rise in the mornings.

It's probably seasonal affective disorder, but I feel my mood is heavily predicated on my own perception of how much sunlight is streaming through my window right when I wake up. It sets the tone for the rest of the day.

Yes. When the sun doesn't hit the room your circadian cycle is affected.

I used to close down the blinds and some times I'd wake up at 11 or 13 AM thinking that it's 9 AM.

Now, out of pure lack I live in a house which has no blinds. So I wake up alone no matter what, at 8:00 AM. If I need more sleep, due to late night activity, I get another one-two hours in the evening.

My parents were telling me and they were right. We need to make sure the sun can enter the bedroom in the morning.

To enhance sleep are necessary a couple of other things:

* Clean oxygen in the room (usually opening the windows 5 minutes before waiting for sleep will do)

* Proper room temperature (you need to feel warm UNDER the blankets, but not sweat)

* Less possible rumors in the room

* Avoid any CNS stimulant (coffee, black tea, coca-cola, etc.). A glass of red wine (just one) is very good. It's the recommended daily dosage (tannins) and although contains sugars, can act as a natural CNS inhibitor.

* light dinner, possibly 4 hours before (say you go to 00:15 AM to bed, it's good to have a light, rich in fibers dinner at 8-9 AM: Yogurt, Vegetables etc. Avoid fruits, after 6 AM, only black bread and vegetables should be taken).

* Close the screens and get a book if you don't feel really sleepy. This habit helps the circadian cycle in my personal experience. Watching movies/tv-series while waiting for sleep is an oxymoron: Your adrenaline levels, instead of getting lowered they get get higher, enhancing the opposite effect (alertness).

Of course, the BEST sleep, comes after a physically intense day and if you don't have physically intense days it's good to do some exercise in order to make your body feel tired at the time you need it to be tired.

PS. Wish you (and me) all the best, because it's one thing knowing (I study pharmacy, so I get a lot of this stuff) and a different thing doing... So this comment was a form of self-advice basically :-)

>Less possible rumors in the room

I think you meant something different, but I'm not sure what. murmurs? noise?

It probably has to do with waking up at 13 AM......

or eating dinner at 8-9 AM ...

Sorry, poor English here. Some times, we tend to have devices inside the room which make subtle noises. Like a digital media player, for example, which tries to keep the HD spinning. It's a noise that you won't listen or pay attention to during the day, but at 2 A.M. your brain listens and process the noise.

The brain is an incredible machine. It tries to isolate all the known noises. So you have a phenomenon where people fall asleep while the usual noises can be captured by the ear, but when a new noise - as in unidentified - jumps in, you suddenly wake up.

If you can keep all these noises to a minimum, by switching off (not off mode, really off) such devices, will enhance your sleep quality. Keeps the brain less busy.

Also note that digital devices (especially routers and digital players) raise the room temperature by at least a couple of Celsius degrees, sometimes more[1]. Ideally, no working device should be on the bedroom while you're sleeping.

[1] I had a Dreambox-500 PVR in my bedroom. Apart from the incredible noise, when it was running during the day, the temperature was at least 6 Celsius higher, with no windows/doors open.

distractions ?

Do you have any more information about air quality and sleep? I've been told this a couple of times, but I've never found much to read about it.

Oxygen reduces sympathetic activity, so for example in patients with heart failure or sleep disorders it is actually helpful.

I've heard that enhances cognitive awareness too, but from a quick look I didn't find any studies online to support the theory. Generally speaking, makes sense: we breath O2 and release CO2. When preparing to sleep the O2 quantity will be diminished considerably in the room. So it's better to allow as much, as possibly bigger % of O2 in the room.

But other than that, I know just know that patients with COPD and sleep deprivation disorders use oxygen therapy to get better. How exactly it works, I don't know though nor I can be 100% that enhances cognitive awareness.

ps. Air quality is usually associated with room temperature. Room temperature IMHO can have an even bigger negative effect on sleep quality. Another important thing not mentioned is bed/pillow quality.

EDIT: Changed H2O to O2 after being pointed out my stupid error.

Certainly you meant we breathe O2.

LOL yes, sorry :-) O2 it is...

How do you balance this need with getting higher quality sleep by totally blacking out your room before bed?

We live in a loft with angled ceiling windows/blinds* - if I don't close them then it's difficult to sleep with the general ambient city light. I was thinking of making an Arduino IR thingy to open them every morning at sunrise automatically, but tbh the noise of the blinds opening would probably wake us up anyway.

I could wear a sleep mask too, but that would obviously prevent me from waking up to the sun too.

On vacation in California this year I noticed myself waking up every morning with the sun and feeling amazing - wish it was as easy to replicate year-round in London :(

http://instagram.com/p/O1K5oYPEV1/

Move

I wonder about this. I fall asleep much better since I made my blinds block night light.

They let in a bit of light during the day, but far from the full sun, and I can sleep in very easily.

I had a wakeup alarm clock that bathed the room in light, but the screen emits light at night. (It was a phillips alarm)

Dunno if this was the same as the other reply mentioned, but Phillips (and probably others) makes Wake up lights: http://www.amazon.com/Philips-HF3520-Wake-Up-Colored-Simulat... - no idea if they really work though.

> (say you go to 00:15 AM to bed, it's good to have a light, rich in fibers dinner at 8-9 AM: Yogurt, Vegetables etc. Avoid fruits, after 6 AM, only black bread and vegetables should be taken).

I'd just like a clarification on this. Why rich in fiber? Doesn't fiber require more energy for digestion, which shouldn't be spent while sleeping?

Fibers are carbohydrates that are not decomposed thus lowering the secretion of insulin from pancreas (insulin spike). So the actual spike instead of having high peaks it is moderated now, making:

1) Your cells more sensitive to insulin (avoiding diabetes)

2) Your contains a more rational amount of energy so your body won't to have to store fat.

I don't quite understand how do you define energy since fibers are not technically digested. Well not the insoluble ones. The soluble are digested but, because of their slow digestion they regulate the insulin spike in a positive way: takes longer but spike (imagine this is a graph with peaks) is way lower (a graph with lower insulin peaks is easier for your pancreas to excrete and your body to handle).

Soluble fibers (e.g. oatmeal) helps with cholesterol, which performs a variety of functions in the human body (it's involved in cell wall functions, permeability, bile acids and so on).

> Doesn't fiber require more energy for digestion, which shouldn't be spent while sleeping?

Digestion requires energy and when you sleep there's much energy to be used elsewhere, so actually when you sleep the digestive process is working at full throttle... so I'm not sure what do you mean by shouldn't be spent while sleeping.

When you sleep having an empty stomach is bad, when you sleep having a load of food sitting in your stomach is equally bad, for the sleep quality but your digestion will work better than say if you were awake.

That is very instructive, thanks!

> Clean oxygen in the room

What's the difference between clean oxygen and dirty oxygen?

Ozone, duh.

On a more serious note, it's probably an awkward way of saying "fresh air", i.e. not smelly.

"I used to just wake up at the rise of the sun"

I like rising with the Sun, but at 58.9 degrees North there is only a few weeks a year where this is possible without radically changing my daily schedule with the seasons (about now happily being in one of those periods).

Yeah, I'm in Iceland. There would be four months a year where I got 90 minutes of sleep a night, and another four where I'd have to convince my boss that a three hour workday was fine.

Nordic Countries have this problem which affects melatonin levels and human psychology. It's not a very good place. I think the best conditions are met in the Mediterranean.

It affects each person differently though. Personally, I don't notice it at all. It is a bit harder to get up in the morning if it's still pitch-dark outside, but otherwise, I have no SAD-type effects.

Others can barely function without those lamps that are white-balanced to match sunlight and programmed to gradually brighten up in the morning.

"It's not a very good place"

I'm inclined to think that the longer hours in summer more than make up for the shorter hours in winter. Doesn't help with sleep but for any kind of outdoor activity it can be glorious.

Hm, I stand with Diogenes Laertius on this: "Moderation is best".

To further this point, ironically in the Middle East (like the Persian Gulf specifically) the sun is so strong even locals do not spend so much time outside with direct contact with sunlight. Everyone, and I mean everyone here, is told by medical professionals Vitamin D deficiency is so widespread causes weird problems. We have to give our child Vitamin D supplements daily, and doctors tell me we could give him horse-pill like supplement regiments; the only place in the world where this is so strongly encouraged.

So, the rest of you, just go outside.

I know of three different people (late 20s to early 30s) who had pains in their joints and were all diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency. All three live in Southern Arizona where most people prefer not to stay out too long in the sun.

It's not that simple. Some of us (I'm a redhead) sunburn so easily, getting enough sunlight to avoid vitamin D deficiency means either near-constant sunscreen application or else a long-term risk of skin cancer.

My doctor emphatically told me to take supplements rather than to spend more time in the sun.

All sources I've read seemed to indicate that white people only need a few minutes a day of direct sun exposure to the entire body to get sufficient vitamin D. How long does it take you to burn?

I'm under the impression that depending on your skin type you can burn within a few minutes.

I was under the impression that you can build up your tolerance to the sun by slowly increasing your exposure to it each day. Does this not apply for certain skin types?

For some skin types the effect is so small that you can just not take it into account. Especially people with red hair are known to have these skin types (hair and skin color are both dependent on malanin)

I'm an Irish redhead who lived in Australia for a decade, doing lots of outdoor sports.

To solve your problem: Put sunscreen, sunglasses, and a hat on. Go outside.

Slip on sunglasses, slop on sunscreen, and slap on a hat!

And take your canvas bags!

My understanding is that taking supplements isn't enough; you still need to go out in the sunlight for the vitamin D to activate.

Oh yes, for us Canadians it's really as simple as "just go[ing] outside".

If you have an infrared light in your bathroom, using it before/after shower while undressing/dressing can help your body make a little more Vitamin D.

Vitamin D is synthesized by ultraviolet light.

Also, a recent discovery suggests sunlight lowers blood pressure via blood vessel dilation. Its not quite known how sunlight does this - one possibility is that it mobilizes nitric oxide in the skin.

I just realized for the first time that I'm apparently using F.lux differently from all other people. For me, it's about making the color palette more compatible with the lighting situation in the room. I'm not into all that circadian stuff at all.

I love the new features, but I'm not wild about the software calculating the "night-time-but-not-bedtime" duration for me. Though F.lux seems to go into the opposite direction, I would prefer more configurability not less - for example letting people set the transition times themselves and enabling them to have as many lighting modes as they want.

Same thing here, I also thought that Flux was designed with white balance harmonisation (wrt the environment) in mind. What I thought would have been neat is the option to use the webcam (or ambient light sensor in macbooks) to actually estimate the ambient light temperature every hour or so, and make a gradual adjustment. I'm not sure if there are good algos to estimate the lightning from a few webcam frames, I just wanted to put this idea out there.

This sounds like an excellent idea to me. I use redshift and have various sleep troubles that often keep me up when it is dark. I've tried manually shutting it off when I'm awake at night, but I find that now that I am used to the shifting my eyes do not appreciate a bright screen in a dimly lit room. I sometimes use brighter ambient lighting but haven't found it makes much difference for me (quite likely related to my specific issues). I think in general keeping both the screen relative to the ambient light and ambient light relative to sleep schedule is important. Of course, I'm one of those paranoid types who disable the webcam in the bios unless expecting to use it so that wouldn't help me specifically, but ambient light sensors sound like something every computer should have IMO.

I share your opinion, I very greatly appreciate this sensor in the MBP, as it adjusts the screen's luminous emittance and the keyboard backlights brightness. Now, I wonder about its capabilities. Can it also measure "ambient color"? A quick search didn't reveal any published specs.

I didn't really "get" the purpose of flux for a while. I appreciated the sleep schedule reinforcement aspects of it but if you don't have a normal sleep schedule then it would seem to be less useful. That's always been the major selling point for f.lux forever, and it seemed so intrusive so I didn't use it.

However, I finally figured out the real reason for using it: white balance adjustment. The thing is, our eyes aren't just imaging sensors, they're active systems that continually adjust to ambient conditions. They do lots of things without us even thinking about it. One of the most important things they do is compensate for white balance. If you look at a white wall when the sun is shining on it during the height of daytime and if you look at the same wall during the middle of the night when it's illuminated by artificial light you will perceive it to be the same color in both instances. But in reality it's not, when lit by indoor lighting it's a very different color, but our eyes/vision system automatically adjust for the different spectrum of lighting.

The problem is that computer monitors throw a monkey wrench into this because they are independent light sources. White displayed during the day on a computer monitor is #FFFFFF, during the night it's still #FFFFFF, but this conflicts with the white balance of the environment. And that conflict causes eye strain and discomfort. At night looking at your monitor you might even perceive white to be slightly bluish, due to the conflicting white balance. By bringing the white balance of your display into harmony with the changing white balance of ambient lighting (as it transitions from natural to artificial) you get rid of a lot of those problems.

Hopefully with f.lux adding more configurability into their program they can make people more aware of these benefits regardless of sleep patterns.

I'd happily pay $9.99 through the App store, if you guys ever want to monetize my grateful eyeballs.

same! when it comes to my livelihood i try not to skimp. i won't hesitate to splurge on a desk chair or a bed for instance. flux falls in that category of things i would unquestionably pay good money for.

same. I wish I knew it before

I'd pay for some cool extra modes like darkroom. Or is there a decent program that does that already?

hah, the new version has just this.

Nocturne also does this. I keep it for inverting my Menu Bar when not in use. It would be of course more convenient if f.lux would do this so I can get rid of one extra app in the menu bar.

http://github.com/InBeta/nocturne http://www.blacktree.com/projects/nocturne.html http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-nocturne/downloads/list

Ditto. I'd love for there to be a way to hide the notification icon permanently, though that probably violates the App Store rules.

Ugh. Apple can go to hell. I use F.lux as my main point about the problems with Apple's walled garden. It's available GRATIS for iOS but Apple censors it so you have to jailbreak. The idea that Apple works to thwart this means they are actively hurting people. This specific issue was step one on my long journey to GNU/Linux and leaving Apple and proprietary software behind. Yes, F.lux (Redshift for me now on Linux) is that valuable in my opinion.

There's a new trend I've noticed recently in the software industry behind research driven development.. there's another link on the frontpage about reading software by a startup called Spritz http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/27/spritz-reading_n_48... that has somehow managed to get >300% improvement on reading speeds just by taking eye scroll out of the equation. I'm excited that we've reached the point where we've started questioning the fundamentals of our user interfaces, and I'm surprised how easy the switch over to this next-gen of design has been. I expected the process to resemble the painful switch from Querty to Dvorak, but it's been more creative than that.

I'm slightly confused, are there actually any useful updates to the Windows version or is this just for the mac?

Nope. I just installed the windows version myself, the new features sounded cool. Looks like the ability to even set "this is when I wake up" is still missing from Windows F.lux

f.lux was basically unusable in its previous version that was tied to sunset. In Toronto, for example, f.lux would start kicking in at 5pm in the winter which is no where near most people's bedtimes.

My solution was to continually disable it for an hour at a time until I had enough and uninstalled it. Happy to be able to try it out again.

It's supposed to be tied to the time you turn your lights on (with their different color temp), not when you go to bed. But maybe some people use it differently?

> It's supposed to be tied to the time you turn your lights on (with their different color temp), not when you go to bed.

This assumes you work in a room exposed to sunlight during the day.

It also assumes you don't work in a well-light environment during the 3rd shift.

Regardless though, I think these shortcomings should be resolvable by simply setting your location in flux/redshift "incorrectly". So if you work the 3rd shift and use artificial lighting to give yourself an 'artificial day', then you'd just set flux/redshift to think that you are a continent or so over.

Not sure if you use flux, but you can set the colour temp for your daytime and your night time to match the kind of lights you are working under. They even mark certain temps like tungsten, fluoro, halogen etc ... So you don't have to assume anything.

I also use flux to match colour temperatures. It's pretty great!

I use f.lux when I want to avoid bright light. I don't use it to try to match the color temperature of the room.

As such, I turn f.lux on around the point I start turning lights off, long after winter sunset. And I have it set to a rather dramatic setting.

It's not brightness, it is blue light. You are not suppose to turn blue off when it is time to go to bed. Blue light suppresses melatonin and it is important to start this early and not when your headed to bed.

Personally I hate artifical light and except for my kitchen my house is fairly dim. Work I just keep the lights off and have flu.x installed and dim my screen.

"Basically unusable?" That's a bit dramatic. I never minded the warm screen kicking in before the end of my workday.

It might be placebo, but I've noticed a pretty dramatic drowsiness set in immediately following the f.lux "sunset." A lot of the time I will turn it off so I can stay up and get things done. If that's what one experiences at 5pm, I'd call that unusable.

Likewise. As with a pomodoro ending and the bell rining, the sun setting on PyCharm stops me working. All sorts of chemistry going on.

New version has "working late" mode. http://puu.sh/7lImw.png

Not dramatic - having your screen turn orange at 6pm is unusable. I'm going to work until 11 or 12pm. Let met set it so I start winding down an hour or two before I go to sleep. It does decrease the contrast of text, making it harder to read.

The new stepped changes and options including "Working Late" should help a lot.

To be fair, I think the flux developers would tell you to stop working a lot earlier than 11pm.

You know what, they're right, I'll stop doing side projects, my day job is all I'll ever need.

No, you just don't work until 11pm on them. You go to bed earlier, wake earlier, work on them at a different time, and have a more natural (i.e. solar-based) sleep cycle.

Having side projects and staying up too late do not need to be synonymous.

When sunrise is 8:30 and sunset is 16:45 it's rather hard to work a full time job and a side project simultaneously in daylight hours.

I too found flux unusable.

It was absolutely unusable. Here in the north you would get two hours of sunlight during the winter, and f.lux would work accordingly.

Similarly in the summer, you would get only a few hours of darkness, making f.lux almost completely useless except for a few months of the year.

There's a disable until sunrise option, I kept using that (and don't set the location).

No reason at all to tie this to actual local sunlight/sunset.

Huh, I had a different reaction - it was kicking in much too late, an hour after the light outside started to get dim in Victoria, so I changed the timezone to Calgary so it would start an hour earlier.

I had the same issue, but I disagree with the "unusable" part - it definitely was very usable and I felt serious improvement in my sleep schedules. Yes, I had to postpone it regularly and I'm glad to try new version, but the old one was very useful too.

I got a bit more creative, and now f.lux thinks I live near the equator, a few time zones west of where I actually do.

... which means that your screen stays orange for hours in the morning when the sun is already out.

That's ok - I usually get up around 10 or 11. By then, it's all peachy

Couldn't you just change the location to some place where the sun actually set at around the time you wanted to stop working?

It's funny how we see things differently.

It is my understanding that this was "by design". I.e. that if you work after the sun is set, it's bad for your natural sleep cycle for you to stare at a monitor screen which emits light that looks like the light coming from the sun.

By tying the emitted color from the screen to the rising and setting of the sun, your brain isn't affect by this any more. This doesn't mean that you have to go to bed when the sun sets and your monitor turns yellow - it just means that you increased your chances of feeling tired at a more natural point during the evening.

I'm a long time f.lux user and have happily accepted the yellow sun set on my monitor when the sun outside set. I've even worked long hours with this setting since it's a great ease on the eyes. If you ever worked at night with this setting for a couple of hours and then tried to switch of f.lux, you will feel your eye becoming VERY sore. Only then do you realize how uncomfortable the normal light from your monitor is.

When I had a problem with flux dimming my monitor too early, I just changed the intensity so it didn't get too orange. Just taking a little of the blue off still helps.

Simply use a different timezone. That's what I do during the winter.

My solution was to set the location to south of Hawaii. That gave me the best combination of bright during the day and not dark until 8pm or so. Setting my actual location was making it darken before 4pm.

The old flux was basically a sunset simulator. Complaints about it really have more to do with the solar system and your lat/long.

You could set it to an appropriate lat/long to produce desired behaviour... Then you could move there since the day cycle would be more to your tastes :)

Hmm, I don't like this update. I don't want flux to be on my schedule. My schedule is bad - that's why I use flux. The point of it is to help regulate my own rhythm, not reinforce my bad habits.

That's why it seem you get to set your ideal schedule with a wakeup time.

Our "classic f.lux" mode turns off all the wake time scheduling, so you can just use sunrise/sunset. But if you can pick a time, our super-warm colors are available and will help a bit with scheduling.

Back before I had a toddler who wakes up early every day, I didn't wake up the same time every day, so it would have been a really hard question to answer for me too.

I just witnessed proof that I NEED flux - I turned it off to download this update, and it felt like my eyeballs were stabbed with a blue knife. The difference was shocking. I don't know how I ever lived without it.

I had the exact same experience. I didn't realize how much I am used to it.

I want this technology built into my TV. For now, I'm buying orange shades.

You're crazy if you don't use flux. It's incredible. You'll sleep better, get less headaches and it helps with eye strain. My only regret is that I can't get it on every computing device I own.

You can get twilight on android [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...], or redshift on linux (flux is also available, but redshift is more functional). I think f.lux is available for jailbroken ios devices, as well.

I use EasyEyez on Android. It has a Tasker hook so you can set it to turn on at certain times. The deactivation is slightly buggy though so i have to turn it off each morning with a single tap on my homescreen.

It's also available on jailbroken iPhones. https://justgetflux.com/ios.html

You can get it on iOS if you jailbreak :)

It's in Cydia. It is the #1 reason I wanted to jailbreak iOS7.

I've jailbroken for this reason, it was the only thing I used on the cydia store (although that was also due to the fact most things were for older versions of iOS and they didn't work)

however, my banking app saw the jailbreak and refused to work... weighing up ease of access to accounts vs colour changing phone... I chose accounts...

now I just avoid my phone in the evenings. -- it's really a shame an app like that doens't make it in to the mainline app store.

I probably will jailbreak my iPad when iOS 7.1 comes out. iOS 7 is still a bit too buggy for my taste, and that point release is just days away. Once I can get a jailbreak for that, I'll do it.

I'll leave my phone alone, as I tend not to use it a lot before bed anyway.

Anyone have any links or tips to the best way to jailbreak iOS 7?

It's very likely there will not be a jailbreak for 7.1 for a very long time. Apple will have patched the exploits used to jb the current version.

It is the only reason I jailbreak, I couldn't deal without it.

The worst part about updating Flux is that you have to quit the currently running version, with the white flash that hurts your eyes.

So update it during the day time when its not active

One of the best utilities ever. What I would do to get this on iOS devices. And if you guys feel like monetizing, throw up a donation button I'm sure you'll have transactions ringing nonstop. Thanks for the amazing utility you've created - you help us work better and sleep better.

It's on Cydia.

To elaborate, Cydia is an app store/package manager for jailbroken iOS devices. The US Copyright office and the Library of Congress have confirmed that jailbreaking your iPhone is not a violation of the DMCA, and it is very easy.

Evasi0n7[1] runs as an application on your PC or Mac with your device connected, jailbreaks the device and installs Cydia. It does not affect anything in the regular Apple App Store, it merely lets you install additional programs including tweaks that customize the interface. Perhaps interesting, f.lux is featured on the front page of Cydia, so you don't even have to search for it.

[1] http://evasi0n.com/

What I would do to get this on iOS devices.

If you're willing to go as far as leaving the walled garden, you can get e.g. Twilight on Android. Not what you asked for of course but this is actually a good example of where the closed nature of iOS hurts users.

I'm pretty certain iOS users on HN are aware of the inherent limitations of their devices. It's also easy to give examples of where the closed nature benefits users but it would be tedious to list them in every discussion.

I found all of the apps of this sort on android were sorely lacking. None of them actually adjusted the screen warmth, they just put an "always on" semi-transparent overlay on the center of the screen. If you have software keys on your device, this becomes immediately obvious because the keys don't have the overlay and appear really bright

Such a shame, but I don't think APIs are available to developers for this purpose

Yes, it needs to be provided and enabled on all mobile devices by default. It might increase the health of entire populations.

It exists in Cydia if you are willing I jailbreak your phone.

I had the previous version installed on my mac, and kept seeing sporadic issues with my mouse cursor jumping a couple hundred pixels at once when moving it side to side. Finally disabled F.lux and the problem went away. Anyone know if the new release fixes that issue?

I've had the exact same issue. I just updated to the new beta and my mouse cursor is still jumping. It only happens during the transitioning phase (for me at least), so it's only 20 seconds that my mouse is barely usable. The new features are worth the minor annoyance in my opinion.

Mavericks (or the drivers it ships with) is locking the window server for 50-100ms every time we touch the color table (10.8 was awesome and didn't do this). We've reduced our frame rate to compensate (it's better in this version), but it is noticeable when we do fast animations.

Is this also why when I hover over the menubar icon I get a beachball until it's done animating? I didn't see in this in the old version, but with today's I couldn't access the menu bar at all until it was finished fading.

I've been tracking this but haven't found a fix yet. There is sometimes a beachball if you interact with the menu item immediately after launch. I'll keep looking.

FWIW, Mac dev. here too, seeing the same issue in 10.9 with my app (beachball when interacting immediately after launch.) Haven't been able to track this down yet.

Thanks, good to know it's not just me. The stack trace says "Carbon" a lot, hmm.

I hope they're pushing the latest changes to their linux repo at some time. I love flux but all those nice Mac features make me jealous...

Have you checked out Redshift? I love flux on my mac but it's quite buggy on linux in my experience.

I've been using f.lux for I think about a year. Honestly I think it's just a placebo and I haven't noticed any real effect. My sleep schedule is terrible. I just feel I should comment because all of the only people commenting are those that did benefit (or at least believe they did.) The comments are not an accurate survey of how many people really did see an effect.

The point isn't that it puts you to sleep like a drug. The point is you are ready to sleep; you don't spend forever falling asleep, that sort of thing. So setting a reasonable sleep schedule is still up to you.

I get that. I certainly didn't expect it to solve all my problems. I am saying that I don't think it had any effect for me, or at least that it was very small.

The normal, medical wisdom is "don't look at a screen before you need to sleep". F.lux is proposed as a way to ameliorate the effects of our reckless geeky disregard for what sleep scientists are telling us to do.

If you have trouble sleeping even without the interference of electronic screens or lights, F.lux isn't going to fix any of that because you don't have the problem it addresses.

Did you ever try turning f.lux off late at night?

Everyone that I've spoken to has mentioned that they immediately found themselves squinting or needing to turn down the brightness of their monitor.

The new version number is 26.0. I’m noting this because when I first tried to install the program by overwriting the version in my Applications folder, it was still my old version (23) that ran for some reason. If you don’t see any difference after installation, open “About f.lux” and make sure you’re on version 26.0.

I wish something similar could work on an iPad. I use my iPad before bed and it often impacts on my ability to sleep.

There are ports of this for IOS and android.

On Android it's called "easyeyez".

Android actually has one called 'lux' https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vito.lux

I have not tried it yet, but I hear good things.

I personally prefer Twilight (https://play.google.com/store/apps/)details?id=com.urbandroi...).

There is, if you're jailbroken, it's called F.lux :)

+1 for iPad. I'd pay for this

I love f.lux, but it's ironic that their page has a white background, blinding me coming from the Dark Hacker News [1].

[1] http://userstyles.org/styles/71155/georgify-dark-hacker-news

This is an important problem to fix, because the eyes adjust to the dark screen (your pupil opens up), and in fact switching quickly to a bright screen is extremely alerting.

I used to use black terminals, then went to white due to most webpages being white. Switch from black terminal/emacs to a white webpage was just too irritating. (sometimes painful)

It would be cool if the background of their page changed color depending on your local time.

Liz Danzico's Bobulate[0] has had a "night mode" for years, based on your local time-zone:

[0]: http://bobulate.com/

My fix is to not use dark themes anywhere. When I'm on a website with a dark background I click my "zap colors" bookmarklet which reverses the colors: https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html

How about dark everything? I give you Hacker Vision: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-vision/fomm...

I love the Darkroom feature. I think that'll have some surprisingly handy applications.

Edit: Unfortunately, it seems to completely break when my screensaver kicks in.

Darkroom's great, I just wish it would convert to grayscale before dropping the blue and green channels.

It does.

On the current version on windows* it doesn't. Any differences in blue or green become completely invisible.

*3.10, and I don't see a non-mac beta link

Isn't that what happens when you convert to grayscale? (Assuming the blue and green end up with the same gray values.)

In darkroom mode, 0x80ffff and 0x800000 are the exact same color. I don't mean that just tint disappears, I mean that vast luminosity differences disappear.

I wish it didn't make my dark themed vim look really bright. But great for browsing and not working.

Solarized has a toggle plugin you might be able to use/modify so that you can switch themes easily.

I just fixed this and pushed it up. Download again...

Does flux "broadcast" it's color changes anywhere that would be scriptable? For example, using a dark terminal theme gives the wrong effect in darkroom mode. (90% of the screen is red). So I'd love to be able to script the changes and adjust that (and potentially other) settings. Or maybe a plugin architecture? :D

It might be less than ideal, but I cloned my profile in iTerm and set it to use lighter colors (Solarized Light) and just switch to it when I kick on darkroom. You should be able to map this profile change to a keyboard shortcut, depending on what you're using, to make the switch a little easier.

If you use terminal full-screen (like myself), you can also invert screen colors[0] whenever you switch to it in Darkroom mode.

This makes your dark terminal background, that became light thanks to Darkroom mode, dark again.

It's a little bothersome to invert colors every time, but I guess I'm settling on this for now. I use powerline in tmux and vim, and there doesn't seem to be a quick way to configure it with light-background colors (and changing terminal color scheme doesn't affect its looks).

[0] Inverting colors is toggled with ^⎇⌘+8 by default. You may need to enable this shortcut in keyboard preferences.

I'm also using a lot of dark themes (terminal and others), any quick way around this? They get really bright using darkroom.

Indeed, just tried it out and it will be great for amateur astronomy uses. (red light = doesn't hurt your night vision as much)

It does look much nicer than Cmd+Ctrl+Alt+8...

I am happy with Redshift, as with everyone else finding f.lux on Linux buggy. F.lux is missing the boat on a lot of developers I'm guessing :) Mac people don't work nights anyway, when Starbucks is closed, so I don't see the point..

also can verify that F.lux doesn't work on my machine 12.04 ubuntu - could be the graphics driver.

But Redshift works, and is open source.

f.lux kinda works on linux. I.e. when I start it my screen turns yellow, and that's about it. I can switch between colors by testing the 3 options with the test button (sometimes this works). But other than that its not really usable. Now Redshift.. I didn't even notice it was turned on now, toggled it off and my eyes started bleeding.

Still have to set my location and setup a config file, but happy so far. In any case way better than a broken GUI that F.lux offers. Anyway, nothing to take away from f.lux as they've come up with the original idea.

Way way better than wearing those yellow tinted glasses that make you see blue all over after a good session.

I cannot live without F.lux on Mac and Twilight on Android. Can't wait for my orange shades to arrive as I have CFL lights in the kitchen, which I cannot remove and started to supplement with bioidentical melatonin recently. I've been using F.lux since it got released years ago, used Redshift on Ubuntu, and this release finally brings Windows features to Mac and I'm so happy! I've been ridiculed all this years for my reddish screen and most people ask: "What's wrong with your screen?" and they get, "No, what's wrong with yours?".

Does anyone else have trouble understanding (or "intuitively reading") the graph in the f.lux beta preferences? I discovered that's a kind of "ego-centric" graph. I mean ego-centric just like there once where earth-centric (and later) helio-centric models of the universe.

Because the graph is totally ego-centric, the graph starts when you wake up. I just can't wrap my head around that. In my mind, I wake up at a specific clock time, and the universe is configured in a certain way at this particular moment. In particular, the sun has a certain position in the sky. (interestingly, I use an earth-centric model in this regard).

What's (relatively) constant for me is how the sun moves through the sky (this depends on where you live on earth, plus time of year). Obviously, it's beyond my powers to change the time of year. I could change where I live on earth, but I'm not doing that very often. What's directly controlled by me is when I wake and go to bed... Why can't I change these positions on an otherwise static "map"?

I don't want to express the current year as relative to my life either. I.e. three periods: "the time I hadn't been born yet", "the time that I live", "the time beyond when I died". It's rather insane. Yes, we use Jesus date of birth as a reference point now, you could say that it's bad and we should count from a different epoch or so, but at least things are not expressed relative to my life.

The point I was trying to make is that I see this graph as doing something comparable to saying you're (by definition) born in "the year zero, at 00:00:00".

The problem I had with flux is I couldn't keep my gamma settings on my displays. (windows + intel graphics driver software)

I don't know about any of the "sleep benefits" but as someone that works and enjoys being in front of computers 10+ hours a day, is great! As soon as I got it 3+ years ago my red-eye, eye-discomfort, dry-eye and strained-eye conditions disappeared! I can't use the computer without it (day or night)

Still closed source.

What a shame.

Redshift is good too, and it works on Linux, Mac and Windows.

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

Just found this today. I love how I can set the brightness during the day as well. 5500K feels much better on my eyes than the default 6500K I was using before.

On Ubuntu/Debian, if you want to have an icon to make it easy to toggle it, install:

  sudo apt-get install gtk-redshift

v helpful, wow

I always forget that

It's called redshift-gtk on Red Hat based distros.

It would really be a shame if it was closed source and not maintained.

I was just turned on to f.lux recently and I can't recommend it enough. I find the affects to be really noticeable and positive; working during the night is much less abrasive and I find the transition from screen to bed to be really smooth.

I love that something so simple can have such direct, physical ramifications.

I used to sleep in a room on the roof and leave the door open. The sun would be facing me just when it's up and I'd wake up early. It was great.

But even when I changed room, I didn't close curtains or something, so the sun would directly be in my face when it's up, and I'd wake up and start the day..

But a lot of the time, I'd be up before the sun going up (up by 4h30, work out, take a shower, eat breakfast (steak, eggs, half a liter of milk, some fruits) and start the day. I'd see people have low battery by 11h00 and I'd be throbbing with energy until the very last moments when I come home.

I drank a RedBull only once in my entire 26 years of existence, and it was only this year. I didn't like it.

Man, I was hoping that they would have added Hue support to Mac as well as Windows :(

We are getting there - the Windows one was fading too early at night, so we had to get the schedule right first. The new schedule is a big deal, and we can build a lot from it.

I've been enjoying spotting the sunset. Can't actually see the sun setting where I live, but the sudden change in hue (blueish to reddish - I've set it quite red) is quite noticeable (pleasing to my eyes).

Love F.lux; congrats on the update. Has it fixed that nasty Mavericks multiple display bug that filled the console with thousands of these lines?

6/3/14 21:37:52.209 Flux[26626]: CGSGetSizeOfDisplayTransfer: Invalid display 0x0424e64d

We tracked it down to the system telling us a display was both added and removed in a single callback. (Reported to Apple.)

This new version mostly avoids this bug, but there are still cases where it will appear briefly. We now fix it within a few minutes by polling the displays.

Unfortunately, polling the online displays frequently uses more CPU & results in making MacBooks wake up much more slowly, so while we have a "bulletproof" fix we haven't been able to use it. Hopefully we'll be able to have a 100% solution soon but this build is a considerable improvement. We'll spend some more time testing and see if we can do better before it's out of beta.

Nice.

What about Linux?

The "f.lux: F.A.Q." page only has a broken archive.org link. When I tried using xflux, it was consuming inordinate CPU cycles.

I'd recommend Redshift on Linux

http://jonls.dk/redshift/

These new features are only for the Mac version?

The Windows version is already ahead of the Mac version in features.

What about that feature where you tell Flux what time you wake up/go to bed? I cannot find it anywhere in the Windows version.

Have they fixed the CPU issue?

https://github.com/Kilian/f.lux-indicator-applet/issues/7

I really like f.lux but I do seem to get weird problems on some machines, apart from the above problem I've experiences severe flicker on some machines, others are fine.

huge fan of f.lux - couldn't work without it - I actually switched from iOS to Android over the want for this single app!

it isn't on android, is it? link please

There are multiple, but this one seems to be the touted one:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vito.lux

I have purchased both Lux and Twilight, but Twilight (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...) is better.

Can I have a shortcut for disabling for an hour? Or maybe toggle the setting when I doubleclick the tray icon in windows? That would be really cool, I use the toggle so often and single double- click/shortcut seem so much better than two clicks.

Is flux "compatible" for people with day job and doing side projects after hours? You want to be sleepy when it's time to sleep, but you don't want to be sleepy when you're working on your exit ticket from bigco.

Definitely.

In my experience, it doesn't induce sleep, it just helps alleviate the negative consequences of standard monitor temperatures (such as making it difficult to fall asleep after using the computer late at night).

I used, and enjoyed, f.lux for a few years. These days, though, I just recalibrate my OS color profile to something reddish and leave it there. Why should I want to look at blue light during the day?

The sky is blue during the day, go out and look at it, it's pretty nice :)

I live in Vancouver. Blue sky is something you go on vacation to see. :)

A releated question:

I need to adjust the brightness a few times every day just to match the ambient light.

Are there any better solutions?

I don't use the laptop display as the watching angle is not healthy. I use dell displays.

Anyone know if they have added support for a second monitor for Mac?

Last time I checked it only worked for one of my monitors on my MBP, would be great to start using this again.

To answer my own question for anyone else, DisplayLink still doesn't support colour calibration so F.lux cant be used on a second monitor that is connected with a DisplayLink. Only monitors directly connected.

From F.lux - "I have a DisplayLink USB monitor adapter. Is there a way to make f.lux work for this display? DisplayLink has no support for color calibration, so f.lux can't make changes to DisplayLink monitors. Unfortunately, you can only use f.lux today on displays that are directly connected to your computer. (e.g., it usually won't work over remote desktop either.)"

http://justgetflux.com/faq.html

f.lux now shows you when the sun’s up

We need to get out more...

Aw..scheduler

Now I want a Smart Things[1] integration with this.

[1]: http://www.smartthings.com

Wow, I've JUST downloaded F.lux on my computer. Came here to read Hacker News and this is on the top. Oh, HN... haha

Good to see the HTTPS site/download working. Now if only we had GPG signatures for this.

Sorry for my ignorance but why would we need GPG signatures for something like this?

I'm genuinely curious.

To be more certain that the code I'm about to run was written by the people I trust (by repute) to write non-malicious code.

These guys have built up quite a good reputation, and many people trust them to write useful, non-malicious code. If they did start shipping something iffy, they'd (ideally) quickly lose all of that good reputation, but not before doing quite a lot of harm as people updated. GPG doesn't protect against the authors going rogue, but against someone else maliciously trying to take advantage of this software's good reputation. SSL protects me against a straightforward MITM, but doesn't assert that the server is still under full control of the author and doesn't protect mirrors.

> Disable until sunrise

Thank you F.lux! The one feature I really hoped you'd add.

can we please, PLEASE have an android port of F.lux. All the other apps make my phone erratic and lag, or flash the unfiltered screen at random intervals which is binding at night.

I would gladly pay for this!

Twilight no good? Works great for me.

If that's the same one I tried, it doesn't actually work the same. It works by overlaying a transparent reddish color over everything, effectively "redshifting" whites but also (and unlike flux/redshift) messing up black (black goes from black to red-tinged black).

This was very noticeable for me because I have an AMOLED screen, so going from black to red-tinged-black actually made my phone brighter.

Hmm, you're right about the blacks, but it does the trick for me. Definitely doesn't seem brighter to me, the blue-white brightness is far more wakeful.

I suspect it works much better on non-AOLED screens. In lieu of it, I use "Screen Filter" to turn my brightness down way below what I can normally.

I do have an AMOLED screen, but your eyes could very well be more sensitive to the effect you describe.

Yes, couldn't find a acceptable setting on my Nexus 4.

root + lux with nexus 4 plugin (astronomer mode) is amazing, check it out!

I have Lux and it's pretty good. I barely notice it changing the brightness.

They do for some devices. Contact herf for details.

This is the only app I have to jailbreak my iPhone and iPodtouch.

herf, i've been trying to find some info on this, but can you tell us why the default color settings changed so much? (recommended colors, vs. classic flux)

One answer is: because we could! Previously the setting you'd want right before bed looked totally silly at sunset.

But the more interesting answer is: we made a model after measuring dozens of panels with a spectrometer. The science isn't totally clear on this (it's clearer with super-bright lights), but it's our best read of what you actually need to wind down on a cross-section of current devices. Some of the new LED panels are pretty effective at stimulating melanopsin.

Overall, you can reduce a lot of circadian stimulus by dimming really far, but assuming you're working at a moderate level, you need pretty warm colors.

Really though, we can only do so much with displays, because if your lights are pretty bright in your bedroom, it doesn't matter what we do. So we'll probably have a large number of users choosing some less intense settings just because the room they're in doesn't match.

F.lux never worked for me. (Ubuntu 12.04) Cool idea though.

Try redshift, I find it much better than flux on Ubuntu.

why the topic doesn't mention is just for the mac?

What features does f.lux have that are not in redshift?

Still no option to remove the icon from the menu?

Check out Bartender.

so if I'm working in a room with daylight temp. bulbs past midnight, should I avoid F.lux?

Is f.lux good for my eyes?

YES! Not using it is BAD for your eyes

Yes, finally!

*blinding at night.

how is twilight?

Android pls.

I've found Lux Auto Brightness to be a reasonable substitute.

Lux works really great if you have a Nexus 4. Instead of just overlaying a partially transparent block of color, it actually adjusts the screen temperature at a much lower level in the OS.

There is a Nexus 4 plugin on the Play Store to intsall if you want to try it out, made by the same developer.

astronomer mode is simply amazing. I rooted my nexus 4 solely to get this feature

Yeah, I turn it on every night for some bedtime reading.

Do you know if this is achievable on the nexus 5? I really don't want to upgrade without it

After using Lux for a long time I've recently migrated to Velis autobrightness [1] and have, anecdotally, found it to work better. Less stochastic brightness changes, better bright and lowlight sensor attenuation and less batter drain.

1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.velis.auto...

Try Twilight

It's my fave, too! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...

Is this stuff mac only?

nope works on windows too.

And Linux! And iOS and Android.

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