I am one of the people who love the idea of f.lux. I use it and it makes my eyes feel a lot better and makes me feel sleepy at the right times.
But the app itself is terribly broken, at least on El Capitan. Whenever I switch modes, the screen flashes the original blue colors---my impression is that even a few seconds of blue light can mess up melatonin production, so this is unacceptable, especially from an app that is pushing the idea of color temperature mattering. Also, "movie mode" results in pulses of blue light every few seconds. Sometimes I select "disable for an hour" and nothing is disabled. "Disable for current app" is also spotty.
For this concept to work, and if the ideas about the effects of color temperature are true, then the implementation has to be completely solid. So I'm glad that Apple is duplicating the functionality of f.lux rather than supporting f.lux itself on iOS. I've also been looking into alternatives on OSX.
It's time that we move on to an implementation that actually works.
Note that autobrightness with f.lux is currently broken in OS X 10.11, and they suggest you to disable it: "Note for people using f.lux on El Capitan (10.11): The new version of "Automatically adjust brightness" in El Capitan seems to cause flickering with f.lux. For the moment, you'll have to turn this feature off to use f.lux.
To make the fix, use System Preferences > Displays and uncheck. Occasionally, a reboot may also be necessary." [0]
> It's time that we move on to an implementation that actually works.
Android announced "Night Light" and Kindle added "Blue Shade" and iOS came in last with "Night Shift" so it appears everyone has.
When F.lux put up affiliate links hawking Himalayan salt lamps and Swarovski crystals and used "cancer" as the 30th word in a press release, I didn't feel too bad hitting "uninstall" for the final time. So Long, and Thanks for All the Tint.
Only one of the three things you mentioned is comparable to F.lux: iOS Night Shift.
> Kindle added "Blue Shade"
Blue Shade is, unfortunately, an exceedingly half-assed implementation; I wouldn't be surprised if an intern wrote it over the course of a month or two. Unlike F.lux, (or Cf.Lumen on Android), it doesn't change the color temperature of the screen—instead, it uses the same naive implementation as apps such as Twilight or Lux, which is a semitransparent reddish overlay that causes black colors to turn red. Considering that Kindles are running a completely customized Android ROM, Amazon could have done so much better.
> Android announced "Night Light"
This is only for Google Play Books, and nothing else. [1]
I see the same type of problems all the time. f.lux flashes between full blue light and the filter for a few seconds whenever I connect or disconnect my external monitor from my MacBook.
The issues you're talking about aren't ones I've seen anyone else complain about (and don't happen for me), so I'm wondering if there's something specific to your configuration that's affecting it.
Actually I believe these problems are fairly common. I've seen them mentioned before and I experience them myself. I think it has to do with integrated vs discrete graphics in Mac laptops.
Disabling transparency in the accessibility options used to fix it, but it doesn't anymore.
I'm very much hoping that Apple will include this functionality in the next major release of OS X as f.lux has historically had trouble keeping up with OS and hardware updates.
A quick scan of the F.lux forum itself and the six or seven HN articles posted here in the past 90 days shows lots of people having issues. It's really not an easy problem because it's trying to do something that operating systems aren't great at and don't really give you a clean approach to tinker. And video drivers are some of the worst code out there. But I've used this thing off and on for years and it's always been glitchy. If you follow Lorna's Twitter you'll see she rants about all the lights in the house going nuts on occasion, too.
This has started happening to me this week, and it is getting worse. In fact, I just opened the laptop, and the screen flickered for 10 seconds---worst yet.
I use redshift[0] on my linux machines which I really like. Cyanogenmod has LiveDisplay natively which is practically the same thing unfortunately it works off off gps location and not manually editable lang/long. Both are really helpful.
Twilight just doesn't feel the same. Unlike f.lux and redshift, which actually seem like they change the color of the screen, Twilight just seems to overlay a red filter. I can't tell you why, but the result is much less satisfactory.
Twilight is just a red overlay. If you want the real deal like f.lux or redshift, there's Cf.lumen (requires root) which works great and even offers a "freeloader" option for pro features.
On Linux I use the 'Negative' Compiz plugin. You can apply it on a window by window basis or desktop-wide. For both modes there are keyboard shortcuts (that's what makes it such a killer feature IMO). People find the screen weird when I enable the plugin but I'm a practical guy and this has saved my eyesight.
I know you can invert colors in OSX but the effect is desktop-wide and you can't use a hotkey to enable or disable it. Does something similar exist for other OSes?
> I know you can invert colors in OSX but the effect is desktop-wide and you can't use a hotkey to enable or disable it.
I haven't tried this myself, but I believe you could rig up something in Automator/Script Editor to toggle the inverted colors, then set up a hotkey for that service from System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts.
I've been using this method for years. Very simple, and gets the job done. Most websites and desktop apps default to whites and off-whites which convert perfectly to blacks and off-blacks when enabled. Pocket, Firefox, and FBReader on my Android devices all have dark modes for reading on my mobile devices; takes care of all my use-cases!
I use the KDE equivalent all the time. Really nice on web pages at night when they're bright white. Don't know if it's saved my eyesight but it has made things more pleasant at times. It's also really nice to be able to invert the desktop and then invert a single window (VLC) so colors are correct there.
Guess I better jump on too: I've run flux on three machines with OSX's from Snow Leopard to ElCap: A white plastic Macbook from 2006, a late-2014 Air, and an early-2014 MBP with a triple-head display setup, and never had any problems at all. So YMMV.
Is anyone else puzzled by the idea of f.lux consuming 14 developer years (at least according to the article), it's an awesome app but that seems like a huge number for what it is: a gui interface to a very simple function*.
Quote from interesting page linked in parent post...
"...Now to be fair most of this is the result of OpenBSD ports choosing to build and package optional dependencies, including the GUI..."
I suspect the people who produce and maintain the ports builds are putting all the options in to cover as many use-cases as possible. I've noticed that some OpenBSD ports give alternatives to pick from with different compilation options. I suspect that might be impractical for many choices.
Now I'm wondering if I can build sct.c on the Slackware box and have a play with a bash script setting the colour temp by time of day for current latitude...
If this is true, it's unfortunate. Things like flux should have a small footprint and a small working domain. I'm willing to spare some complexity for usability tools, but always end up getting off the bus when it gets too heavy.
Will it be released as open-source?
Doesn't really make sense to develop it as a closed-source application, when the application itself is offered for free, and open source versions exist already.
I have 2 issues with flux, one personal one science related.
personal) I'm colorblind and it really messed with my ability to guess at the appropriate colors, and sometimes made it impossible to read text on the screen. (Red on black is hard for me)
science) One of their more prominent articles showcases a study of how reading on a stock iPad can mess up your sleep a lot, but reading a book with standard bulb (much warmer than the iPad backlight) has a much smaller effect. I remember studying the effect of light in neuroscience classes in college, and blue light is potent, but so is total light received. Indirect light from bulb, or having a device blast light directly into your retina. Never stood a chance. Just shifting the colors can only reduce so much light. For example, max out the brightness on any non oled based screen with a completely black image. You still see light even though those gates have done the best they can.
My general impression of the reporting is "lets throw a bunch of science at you, which doesn't quite say what we do, and hope you jump to our conclusions."
That reporting starts from the research links on the F.lux site which 1) don't really say what they they seem to think they say and 2) often conveniently hide behind paywalls. The F.lux team genuinely seems to care about human health yet they haven't bothered to write the equivalent of a three page term paper about what they're basing their work on the past 8 years. It's odd.
Even in this thread (as in the other six or seven F.lux threads that have popped up on HN lately) smart people are saying things that simply don't make sense. We're basically dealing with the equivalent of blue-blocker sunglasses from the 80s and it's odd seeing HN commenters spout the same informercial-grade rhetoric I laugh at on late night television.
Some people, perhaps against their better judgement, like to use screens even as they're getting closer and closer to sleep. Some even use screens in bed. The difference in harshness of a 5800K screen and a 2700K screen is quite easy to feel in an otherwise dark room, late in ones "day", and once you're used to the latter, it is very uncomfortable to look directly at the former. One of them feels better on your eyes than the other. It's that simple! How exactly does this not make sense?
Enjoy your eye strain...? :-/ I find your laughing at our mutual experience and desire to share it with others, so that they may too use screens with less discomfort, odd. And unlike an infomercial, we're not trying to sell anything.
To clarify, I was speaking to broader claims of people saying f.lux puts them to sleep like a baby and the f.lux authors themselves claiming it as a tool in the fight against cancer and acne.
Note that f.lux does not even claim to prevent eyestrain. The closest they come is this: "Our users say that f.lux prevents eyestrain." That's hardly science; in fact it's exactly how shady companies market vitamins.
Also, I don't know what "feels better on your eyes" means but I will point out that if 2700K screens felt better "in an otherwise dark room" then movie theaters would use them. You say "It's that simple!" but like most things, it's a little more complicated than that.
You see no difference between sitting 0.5 meters away from a screen that's projecting its own light or sitting 15 meters away from a screen that has light projected onto it?
A photon is a photon, regardless of whether it's emitted directly or reflected. All that matters is vibration frequency and intensity of the stream of photons.
Exactly! Furthermore, I wonder if the backlight leakage from an LCD ruins the effect (the reason why a black screen isn't actually dark). None of the studies they cite actually use LCD monitors.
I have a pair of sunglasses that blocks light below 490nm. Even with flux in the "Candle" setting I notice a small difference, so there is definitely some blue leaking.
I used it for well over a year, but I noticed I was always disabling it as soon as it turned on. Eventually, I realised that having an accurate, carefully-calibrated display was pointless if I was going to use f.lux.
I tentatively tried using melatonin tablets instead, and I've found it works really well for me. Set an alarm for about 30-40 minutes before you want to go to sleep, take the tablet (sublingually) when the alarm goes off, and you'll notice you start feeling sleepy right about when you need to fall asleep.
Obviously, this kind of exogenous melatonin intake can only crudely approximate the curves for plasma melatonin levels resulting from endogenous production in the presence of zero artificial light, but using f.lux only removes one source of blue light. Sure, you might feel sleepy staring at your screen, but blue light inhibits melatonin synthesis so strongly you could turn on your bedroom light and have your melatonin production bottom out. IIRC, you can significantly attenuate melatonin production with light levels of ~100 lx, which is comparable to a really dim room. Good luck getting ready for bed in complete darkness.
You also need to titrate your dosage to find the right levels. For me, 0.2-0.5mg is all I need to achieve the necessary sleepiness to motivate me to get to sleep. I can take more with no noticeable effects, but I know others who report headaches the morning after. Also note that the older you are, the less melatonin you need.
Every time there is a thread about f.lux I get the feeling that I stepped into a cult meeting ;) Maybe it's different if you have trouble sleeping, but it seemed to be completely irrelevant to my sleep and I don't want my screen to look like cheap instagram filter.
Give it time. You'll get used to it after a while, to the point where a couple of weeks later you won't perceive the colors as "wrong" (assuming no other light source in the room). You'll just perceive them as slightly warmer.
That's not what it's for, though. For graphics you need D6500, there's no way around it, circadian rhythm be damned. This is mostly for reading things late at night.
It still bothered me after a few weeks, specially since "automatic" setting started making my screen red at like 18:00, more than 6 hours before I usually go to sleep.
It was incredibly annoying :/
Maybe I just didn't see that much benefit because I never look at screens in rooms without additional (yellowish) lighting.
I customise mine so it's not as red - just apply enough tint to match my lightbulb. Without Flux the screen feels off because every other light source from inside and outside the house has a warm tint; The screen just stands out too much.
I am puzzled by so much fuss about one simple and small app (I am not questioning its usefulness, I am using it too). Every once in awhile (and frequently lately) it pops up on hacker news front page or somewhere on the web.
Because a lot of us are hammering on our laptops at odd hours and get a much better night's sleep as a result of f.lux and redshift. I can say without reservation: this simple little piece of software significantly improved my life. It's probably more important than something like emacs in my quality of life.
F.lux is based on a very, very simple idea. It comes from the basic idea that "white" is not a universal when it comes to human vision, because not all light sources are the same. That's why "white balancing" photographs is necessary, because you need to balance colors appropriately for the given light source. But our eyes do this automatically. If you take a white sheet of paper outdoors, indoors, wherever, it will generally always appear white to your eyes, even though its appearance will change color in an absolute sense.
This is where computer displays confound things, because they are a source of light, but they are used among other sources of light. And those light sources change over the course of a typical day. And thus the white balance changes over a typical day. Let's say you're using a computer in an office with white walls. Those walls don't seem to change color throughout the day, but they very much do, because the light illuminating them changes. From sunlight to artificial light. Your eyes adjust to this naturally though. But computer displays don't change, which means that during daylight hours your eyes might perceive the display as being normal while after sunset your eyes start to see the display as blue-ish or excessively bright. Alternately, your eyes could perceive your surroundings as different, seeing artificial lighting as yellowish and dim.
F.lux is simply an attempt to harmonize the white balance of your display with the white balance of your surroundings, based on some information about the type of lighting you have and the local times of sunrise/sunset. Once you get used to it it seems perfectly normal that displays should do this.
The problem is that a lot of the underlying technology (monitors, display drivers, OSes, etc.) are built on entirely different assumptions, the idea that the display itself is a universal arbiter of the "correct" color choices and there's no need to white balance harmonize with the rest of the world. Which means that sometimes it's difficult to get something as simple as F.lux to work on a given platform.
That's why it's a topic of frequent conversation. It should really be a feature built into all displays and operating systems as it's a very straightforward idea. And essentially every digital imager in the world is built based on a universal understanding of the need to account for white balance, but there is still an uphill battle in getting people to understand the need for white balance management in digital displays.
I agree. It's helpful, but by no means novel or interesting beyond being a tool in the utility belt. It gets more attention than other tools far more interesting.
basically its the old Microsoft adage that Apple somehow co-opted, embrace - extend etc etc.
Apple implemented a feature for the next release of osx that does what f.lux does, knowingly.
Ehhhh, it's a grey area. They are definitely in the 'embrace' stage, but they're doing it on iOS, where f.lux doesn't really have a presence. You can argue that makes it different, or you could argue it's close enough.
That is a story from a week ago. But news about flux pop on hacker news for as long as I read hacker news.
And about that apple feature, I did not get that also, so what if they implemented it (and did not allow 3rd party apps to do it)? It`s not like they have to check if there is an app for something that they like to put in the OS (and there is an app for almost everything now).. Btw, I use Android primarily because of customization options, there was not one thing I could not do on Android which I needed and there were some really advanced stuff that I wanted from a phone :)
Back in the olden days (System 7~8) Apple would actually buy out the third party tools they wanted to add to the OS (MenuClock, WindowShade, etc). Then Steve Jobs came back and they just started Sherlocking developers instead...
Since I installed F.lux on my work computer I've experienced a significant decrease in eye fatigue and a general increase in productivity while working at night.
Would recommend for anyone who works in low-light conditions.
Interesting. I generally start to get really sleepy as soon as the red shifting kicks in. I like it, really need to sleep more, but I wouldn't say it's the recipe for increased productivity.
If you suffer from any kind of eyestrain, it's a godsend. I have it set permanently to my night temperature here in the UK at the moment due to the short days and overcast weather.
I use it, and I like it, and I think it works. But I also think they should really try to publish a paper on it, proving it works to improve e.g. people's sleep quality.
It's free and not obviously harmful and has a plausible biological rationale, but if you think it may not work, it's easy to run your own self-experiment: stick it in a little randomized script and record when you go to bed for, say, 50 days and see. That's what I did with Redshift: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#redshiftf.lux
Unfortunately, that self-experiment has the problem of the subject (yourself) knowing which "treatment" you're getting. I'm not sure how to double-blind something like this, though. It may require a study where we record subjects' sleep patters, make them use a screen at night, but don't tell them that it's the screen colors that are under experiment.
Empirically, I didn't notice and that almost screwed up the experiment; see the part where a driver change broke Redshift and I didn't notice for a month.
(As well, I would note that you may be overestimating placebo or expectancy effects here. In the meta-analyses I've seen, randomization is much more important than placebo controls.)
Interesting - if I understand correctly, you're saying that you didn't notice for a month that no color balance was happening. Then perhaps an even simpler experiment preliminary experiment could be done to just see how well subjects are able to guess if a screen has been color balanced at night. If most people can't tell most of the time, then that simplifies doing an efficacy experiment.
Not quite. The reddening is blatant, so if someone had asked me on any particular day if Redshift was on or not, I could always correctly answer. But it was randomized on a daily basis, so it is possible, even probable, for occasional long sequences like 100001 to happen where the shifting was on or off for multiple days in a row. What I'm saying is that I turned out to be paying so little attention to whether the shifting was on or off, certain that if it was off on a particular day that just meant the experiment was going as planned, that I didn't notice even 20+ days of a single setting.
I've used it for a long time and it makes the difference between feeling sleepy in front of a computer and falling asleep in front of a computer. Highly recommend it.
Now it would be great if android included it in the system soon. I used an app for it, but as soon as 6 came out, I dropped all unnecessary privileges from installed apps.
Unfortunately you can't have any app drawing directly on the screen if you want to change privileges. That means I had to choose between silly-bright screen or more secure system... and that's a terrible tradeoff to present to users.
CM has its own issues though. For example nexus 5 gets monthly security patches from upstream right now, but CM-13 for the same model was last updated in September 2015 :/
That's not comparable. I'm using the lowest brightness 99% of the time already. (the other time is when I'm outside, at midday, in summer) Flux was still a huge improvement in the evening.
Sometimes, if using a laptop in bed, I wish it would be possible to make the LED backlight dimmer than the minimum setting, or apply a black semi transparent overlay to dim things, from within f.lux. At the moment I have to use another 3rd party app for that
Fyi Display Link devices (which are used to dock a laptop to two monitors via a single usb cable) do not support color calibration, so flux does not work.
Found out after purchasing a usb docking station. Still fairly happy with the purchase though. Display Link is actively releasing new drivers so there is hope.
I was working a REALLY long shift at work about a year ago (datacenter move). Came back to my desk from the DC at about 3am and for a few minutes, thought my system or monitor was broken because everything was dark dark shades of orange.
Then I finally realized I'd never been up at that time with f.lux running... D'oh.
But the app itself is terribly broken, at least on El Capitan. Whenever I switch modes, the screen flashes the original blue colors---my impression is that even a few seconds of blue light can mess up melatonin production, so this is unacceptable, especially from an app that is pushing the idea of color temperature mattering. Also, "movie mode" results in pulses of blue light every few seconds. Sometimes I select "disable for an hour" and nothing is disabled. "Disable for current app" is also spotty.
For this concept to work, and if the ideas about the effects of color temperature are true, then the implementation has to be completely solid. So I'm glad that Apple is duplicating the functionality of f.lux rather than supporting f.lux itself on iOS. I've also been looking into alternatives on OSX.
It's time that we move on to an implementation that actually works.