> There’s one big slider, and you can adjust it whenever you want to change it. f.lux will remember what you choose during the day, in the early evening, and at night.
Does that mean I can’t adjust the preferred temperature at night if it’s currently day time? If so this is a huge regression. If not, the two sentences are badly worded. I already find the current f.lux interface badly designed[0] and this might just make it worse.
[0]: First, its main interface has a slider and a button group below it. That makes no sense because the button group affects what settings the slider display. It really should be a tabbed region enclosing the slider instead. Next, options like “fast transition,” “sleep in on weekends” really shouldn’t be placed in the menu bar. It makes the initial setup a lot more troublesome, and really makes no sense given you already have a window to configure it. And some options aren’t really clearly described in the first place.
You can adjust daytime/sunset/night-time under one view (via upper right "grill"-options icon / "Adjust day & night colors together") as 3 separate sliders - works fine for my use-case scenario. What I'm most happy about is that they've fixed the stuttering issues when using special graphic modes (games..etc.) in v4! :). Also, for the lazy Win upgrade: https://justgetflux.com/dlwin.html
I was using f.lux/redshift for a few years because everyone else was using it. During a reinstall of my system I forgot to install it and it took me about a week to realize it was missing...
I never bothered to install it again because I realized I did not gather any benefits from it.
I used to think it didn't help because honestly the difference was marginal, but when I turned it up Candle or Ember I started really noticing how I got more tired in the evenings.
I once was a regular streamer on Twitch.tv and would regularly plug the use of blue light reducing tools. Another fun thing you can do is wear orange safety goggles to completely block all blue light from the room. You look pretty silly, and I'd wear them on stream sometimes. And people would always ask me, "what's with the orange goggles?" There were a few times when I'd get someone to install F.lux, they'd use it for a bit, and then turn it off, and they'd instantly get it. If you try this experiment for yourself, the difference is incredibly jarring.
If you have any trouble sleeping at night, I'd highly recommend trying one of these strategies. My orange goggles made their way into my digital nomad one bag, they were so useful for my sleep. Occasionally I'd actually sleep in them.
If you want to get really crazy, you can order a bit of a material called "rubylith" (just do a Google search for it) and put it over your laptop or phone screen. It makes things really red, but if you are just reading your Kindle books in bed it can really help prevent staying up until 2am on accident.
Now if only they'd stop selling Kindles with awful pure white backlights. You only need it when it's dark, and when it's dark your light should be yellow/orange!
I have Kobo Aura ONE[1] and it has automatic orange backlight. I'm relatively happy with it even though the lighting is slightly uneven and has barely visible greenish hues at the corners...
So interestingly enough, wearing the orange goggles or using the rubylith on a device that lights itself can get less blue light into your eyes than reading a book with a lamp on next to you (or of course, wear the goggles with a lamp on works too). Could be a further way to fall asleep faster. I've been fascinated by this phenomenon for a while - the theory I've heard is that humans evolved during a time when the sun was the only source of light besides maybe fire, and so darkness or light the color of fire signaled the time for being sleepy. When you get the blue colored light into your eyes at night the brain gets confused and doesn't know what time it is.
Haha, no problem! And yeah, candles would definitely then work. Some people I've read suggest that if you can don't use any artificial lights at night (obviously kind of difficult), and if you do you'll naturally start getting tired at sunset. Then you get to wake up at 5am! Hard to have a social life though.
In a nutshell, what normally happens is light decreases, your body releases melatonin, and you feel sleepy shortly thereafter.
With the advent of artificial lighting, we started delaying our dim-light melatonin onset (DLMO). It most strongly responds to blue light, but it does respond to other wavelengths, too, so some people find that any light is too much.
Reminder that both Mac OS and Windows include blue light reducing as a built-in feature. In case you don't like installing applications for something the OS already does like me.
I can't speak for the Windows implementation, but this is far from true on the Mac OS 'Nightshift' implementation. Nightshift won't get nearly as warm as I prefer it, misses the Hue integration, misses having multiple levels for particular times of the day, general quick disable, disable by application, disable when in full-screen application... The list goes on. There are plenty of reasons to still be using Flux on Mac.
The only options in the Windows implementation are "colour temperature at night", "on time" and "off time". So that's objectively much less customizable than flux.
Tried to switch from Flux to Windows 10 nightlight, was awful. If you wake your computer from sleep after sunset, nightlight doesn’t activate automatically. Been a known issue since they released it.
Curious; apart from not needing any of the new features in Sierra+, and not wanting to risk bricking your primary work machine, what’s preventing you from upgrading?
I guess the counter question is, why upgrade? I'm usually a version or two behind on Mac and iOS. The features added are usually minor. Never seems to be a reason to upgrade quickly.
I have work to do at $dayjob and for that purpose the laptop works just fine. I don't want to risk any upgrade, especially after I heard that some tools and applications I use don't work well under High Sierra.
You're right, it doesn't. I thought it did, but it doesn't. Even uninstalled F.lux on it because I thought it would. Its my partner's laptop nowadays. I reinstalled F.lux on it. Thanks for the heads up
I use F.lux because they are the little guy, and first to this market by a long shot. Getting Sherlocked [1] by the big players after years of original work on a project is terrible. Lots of small businesses (or projects for that matter) is much preferable to a handful of large ones blatantly cloning ideas they did not originate.
Should OS makers not improve their OS based on what’s out there in the market, and purposefully harm the user experience then?
Night Shift is a simple concept and there’s not a huge amount of different ways to do it. It’s something I consider analogous to copy and paste, a trashcan, or a clock in your dock.
Long-time Mac users have a term for this: Sherlocking[0]
It seems far more likely that a company without an obvious business plan might run out of money trying to sell software that seems to be an unnecessary duplication of features built in to the OS than for Apple to eliminate a feature they've only recently introduced and promoted.
I'm hoping neither happen, and I wish the f.lux team the best, but I definitely think you have the odds the wrong way around.
Flux is on version 4 and has been around for a very long time. Dare I say a decade now? Apple probably barely cares about the feature. You think they're going to iterate on it close to as much as Flux? History certainly does not show that.
When a small business has an idea it is their whole world. They think about it day and night and have to constantly improve upon it or die. A small idea can sustain a small business. A small idea to a large corporation though is a blip on the radar, and so has little incentive to continue being improved. This is now a tiny feature in a big company, mainly added for a keynote announcement and for marketing purposes, with little value to their bottom line down the road.
Prediction: Going forward I expect NightShift to improve at about the same rate as Finder.
F.lux was out for years before the big players finally realized what a good idea it was. It was copied without the slightest attribution or thank you. It may be legal, however not very ethical and rather dishonorable if you ask me. This path leads to a future where only big players exist. Invention by individuals is disincentivized if it will just get copied at the first sign of success.
Apple has taken ideas quite a bit. There's a term for it in the Mac world and in the iOS world they are infamous for "taking" tweaks done in the jailbreaking community. Rarely if ever is there any compensation or recognition given.
That's not right. Apple also many times doesn't not iterate as much as the independent developer would. But they do effectively kill off the small guy's work nonetheless.
That doesn't sit right with me.
Regarding ideas. People say that about so many things especially with features the big guys take. With hindsight it is done even more.
I have been using f.lux for years, and was happy that when NightShift became available that I could just use it.
The short of it is that, for me at least, NightShift is almost useless. It simply does not get red or dim enough if I'm reading right before bed. Same thing goes for Android, which is why I have Twilight still installed there. Seems like such an easy option to make the color temperature more customizable, so I think it sucks that Apple didn't do this.
I've had better experience with CF.lumen on Android (you need root though) because it's more of a tint than an overlay, so blacks stay black and not dark red like with Twilight.
I must admit I stopped using f.lux when Windows 10 came with Night Light, however this update is making me reconsider. I really like the wake-up-time idea, as well as considering "early evening" a separate time interval for which a color temperature is stored.
MacOS's feature at least is far weaker than Flux by a longshot. It doesn't tint the colors nearly enough. Sure the OS technically does what Flux does, but when the third Parth app is so much better, it makes sense to use it. Also Flux came out far before. And no thank you or notice has been given to them by the big guys. For that reason alone I'd continue to use Flux.
Just wanted to take a moment and thank the developer for their hard work. It Really started a movement and is now standard on pretty much every OS now.
I'll go against the grain here and say that I see no benefits in Flux. I used to be in the hype train, but I've noticed it annoys me more than anything, and every time when the night would come I would just disable Flux until it just didn't make sense to have it installed on my laptop.
I don't know if it's just me, or if it's just a trend marketed by pseudo-science claims.
It's probably not just you, but it's more than a trend. I actually found it because I already often turned down the blue on my desktop screen at night using its controls, before I heard of any supposed health benefits, and I was searching for a way to do the same on my laptop.
I can't say I notice if it helps me sleep better, but I definitely find it much easier on the eyes.
When I turn it off at night, with as little brightness as possible on my monitor, the blue hurts my eyes.
The scientific ideas behind it regarding sleep sound likely, but honestly if they were all proven to be crock tomorrow I'd still use it to ease my eye strain because it clearly can do that.
Former neuroscientist here: it's just you. You may not respond sufficiently/differently to cutting out blue wavelengths, but for many people, it helps.
It's not pseudo-science, and I'm not even sure why you said that. There's quite a bit of literature at this point demonstrating that the suprachiasmatic nucleus (the primary timekeeper of the body) is heavily entrained by specialized retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), that are most sensitive to blue wavelengths.
Increasingly though daylight-frequency lightbulbs are becoming mainstream. Our house has them fitted everywhere, as does a new development of 100+ homes nearby.
I suppose that may affect sleep patterns in the short term but after several years of using exclusively 6500K lighting I don't have any problem falling asleep after turning-off the bedside lamp even though there's no graduated transition from 'blue' light to darkness.
I wanted to say that we stopped thinking of f.lux as a way to match a room about 8 years ago. We have been consumed with the idea that if the human circadian system is controlled by light, and if nobody knows what the numbers are in real life, then it is vitally important that we figure it out.
Our main effort since then has been about people and understanding how they react to light over time, and how technology can fix it. f.lux is intended to be a seed that will explain how all of our lighting can work better. It's a big project that extends beyond screens, and we think software is central to fixing the problem.
People who wake up at the same time need different timing and amounts of light, and it's not really about matching the color of a screen to a room. We've learned that almost every room is already too dim (during the day) or too bright (at night). And the trouble is that most people can't figure this out by looking around - they need some tools to help out.
This system that controls sleep and alertness is nonvisual, which means that everyone's intuition about what looks good might be pretty far off from what it does to your body. This certainly is borne out by the last 100 years of electric lighting.
Electric lighting has shifted sleep schedules by >4 hours, and people are not sleeping nearly as much as a result. We think this is connected to ADHD, cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, mood disorders, and many other serious problems.
So while it is true that other people have turned screens orange like f.lux did in 2009, the truth is we didn't do nearly enough back then. Our goal is to understand the biology and make something that actually works for a wide variety of people.
We have tried to address this question ("people, not screens") in little pieces, e.g., why we are making big changes to f.lux's schedule default settings on our "big update" page:
We wondered this too - we surveyed people who were installing f.lux for the first time about what they cared about - "eyestrain vs. sleep". 90% of people said better sleep, 60% said eyestrain. So both are important.
But imagine you get a job that requires you to be up at 8AM (and you want to take it). Do you have control of that part of your biology or does it have control of you?
The theory is that your environment is one of the major things controlling your biological timing, and the indoor spaces at least are ones we built so we should understand what it takes to change them.
> Do you have control of that part of your biology or does it have control of you?
I've personally found that I have a pretty heavy degree of control over it via the orexin† pathway: if I force myself to wake up and eat immediately for a few days at 8AM, then my body will associate 8AM with eating and shift everything else around (when I get hungry; when I get tired at night; etc.) to ensure I'll be wide awake at 8AM to "catch that meal" (that in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness was probably a rabbit or something.)
Cool that you're on HN, and your mission sounds fantastic.
One thing I've never figured out though, what's f.lux's business model? You two seem to be investing considerable resources into all of this for years on end, is it all charity?
It is kind of an extended research project... but I would say that it's looking complicated enough that we think all lighting will need some software to absorb that complexity in the future. So we are already doing a lot with measurement and other ways to sustain it.
Does this mean flux is a passion project only? No business model or revenue stream for it? Or are you trying to keep quiet on it. I know you have had great success before so that makes me wonder even more.
Interesting. You've got me wondering whether it would be feasible and useful to hook up all lights in the room and adjust their brightness and colour temperature as the day progresses.
Not heard of yee and will investigate, thanks! I really dislike hue. Their lights are pretty inefficient (compared to dumb leds) and rely on zigbee and a wifi bridge. Would much rather have something like this using PoE lights. But I suppose this is a good start.
A little off topic at this point, but just as a note: there yeelights are cloud enabled by default.
You need to enable developer mode to control them directly.
You'll still need some kind of bridge though. It doesn't need to be the original: A raspberry pi is sufficient
Do you have any suggestions for using flux as someone with a non 24 hour schedule? Right now changing the wake time is so buried that I'll often push it forward several hours, then come back in a week to do it again.
Is there an easier way to handle this? Perhaps some way to tell flux "I just woke up" and have it figure things out? Hook into a sleep tracker like on fitness trackers or Sleep as Android?
Seriously thank you so much for this project and all the effort that's gone in so far. I've been using it since about a month after first release and I cannot imagine using a computer without it.
I use Twilight on a regular android. Works fine for what I want, not sure if it has all the features that f.lux has: I just use it to have my screen red-er.
I tried a lot of different things over years, and when I mastered light my sleep problems were solved (hard scenario for me at the time - work from home, remote developers who worked at nighttime, no committments to force me to wake up at any given time of day.)
Light has been understood to be the dominant zeitgeber for a long time now, in humans and the vast majority of other organisms, and this has not changed. Entrainment is also affected by temperature, eating, etc., but that does not in any way diminish the importance of light.
There's been a lot (but not enough) research in this area. There are other factors such as exercise and temperature (so-called zeitgebers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeber), but light is an extremely strong one for most people.
I have been using f.lux for years and loved it. One of the first things I would install on any system. But this latest update fundamentally broke for me. It goes dark an hour or more early, gets light again at sunset. It brightens up an hour before sunrise, and darkens as day rises. I end up manually enabling and disabling it to get things right, and half the time just kill the process.
Most likely the combined settings of some combination of my wake time and/or daylight savings time has something to do with it. I'm not sure. But before this last update, it always "just worked". And now that is no longer true.
Biggest problem with F.lux used to be that it was tied to geo-location. As a Finnish person (with sometimes only a few hours of sunlight per day), you had to fake your location to something that would approximate the desired circadian rhythm. I hope this has been addressed by now.
(E.g. on macOS and iPhone you can simply just set the daily time when Night Shift activates.)
99 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadDoes that mean I can’t adjust the preferred temperature at night if it’s currently day time? If so this is a huge regression. If not, the two sentences are badly worded. I already find the current f.lux interface badly designed[0] and this might just make it worse.
[0]: First, its main interface has a slider and a button group below it. That makes no sense because the button group affects what settings the slider display. It really should be a tabbed region enclosing the slider instead. Next, options like “fast transition,” “sleep in on weekends” really shouldn’t be placed in the menu bar. It makes the initial setup a lot more troublesome, and really makes no sense given you already have a window to configure it. And some options aren’t really clearly described in the first place.
no phone home/automatic updates (plus it's open source)
RedshiftGUI.
Small, portable, sometimes a bit buggy but absolutely irreplaceable.
There's also a .NET based one, but it's so slow it feels like you are starting Photoshop, so it's crap IMHO.
I never bothered to install it again because I realized I did not gather any benefits from it.
If you have any trouble sleeping at night, I'd highly recommend trying one of these strategies. My orange goggles made their way into my digital nomad one bag, they were so useful for my sleep. Occasionally I'd actually sleep in them.
If you want to get really crazy, you can order a bit of a material called "rubylith" (just do a Google search for it) and put it over your laptop or phone screen. It makes things really red, but if you are just reading your Kindle books in bed it can really help prevent staying up until 2am on accident.
I gotta get me those goggles...
[1] https://us.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-aura-one
Re fire, another thing that’s helped me is using candlelight in the evening. It keeps things darkish (and of course it’s a warm color of light).
With the advent of artificial lighting, we started delaying our dim-light melatonin onset (DLMO). It most strongly responds to blue light, but it does respond to other wavelengths, too, so some people find that any light is too much.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207513
https://www.howtogeek.com/302186/how-to-enable-night-light-o...
Edit: also android and ios
Configurable in System Preferences -> Displays.
> general quick disable
There’s a toggle in the Notification Center, at the top (may have to scroll/pull down.)
> Configurable in System Preferences -> Displays.
The whole problem is that it isn't configurable to get as warm as many people (myself included) prefer.
Not everybody is on Sierra yet. My work laptop still runs El Capitan.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207513
MacBook models from early 2015 or later
MacBook Air models from mid 2012 or later
MacBook Pro models from mid 2012 or later
So, what's the deal? How's it working on yours?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)
Night Shift is a simple concept and there’s not a huge amount of different ways to do it. It’s something I consider analogous to copy and paste, a trashcan, or a clock in your dock.
Long-time Mac users have a term for this: Sherlocking[0]
It seems far more likely that a company without an obvious business plan might run out of money trying to sell software that seems to be an unnecessary duplication of features built in to the OS than for Apple to eliminate a feature they've only recently introduced and promoted.
I'm hoping neither happen, and I wish the f.lux team the best, but I definitely think you have the odds the wrong way around.
[0] https://carpeaqua.com/2013/10/18/stop-sherlocking-yourself/
When a small business has an idea it is their whole world. They think about it day and night and have to constantly improve upon it or die. A small idea can sustain a small business. A small idea to a large corporation though is a blip on the radar, and so has little incentive to continue being improved. This is now a tiny feature in a big company, mainly added for a keynote announcement and for marketing purposes, with little value to their bottom line down the road.
Prediction: Going forward I expect NightShift to improve at about the same rate as Finder.
F.lux was out for years before the big players finally realized what a good idea it was. It was copied without the slightest attribution or thank you. It may be legal, however not very ethical and rather dishonorable if you ask me. This path leads to a future where only big players exist. Invention by individuals is disincentivized if it will just get copied at the first sign of success.
That's not right. Apple also many times doesn't not iterate as much as the independent developer would. But they do effectively kill off the small guy's work nonetheless.
That doesn't sit right with me.
Regarding ideas. People say that about so many things especially with features the big guys take. With hindsight it is done even more.
The short of it is that, for me at least, NightShift is almost useless. It simply does not get red or dim enough if I'm reading right before bed. Same thing goes for Android, which is why I have Twilight still installed there. Seems like such an easy option to make the color temperature more customizable, so I think it sucks that Apple didn't do this.
Thanks for the recommendation!
If you use Windows 7 you have to go third-party.
The older iOS also doesn't have it.
I don't know if it's just me, or if it's just a trend marketed by pseudo-science claims.
I can't say I notice if it helps me sleep better, but I definitely find it much easier on the eyes.
When I found f.lux, those went away immediately.
The scientific ideas behind it regarding sleep sound likely, but honestly if they were all proven to be crock tomorrow I'd still use it to ease my eye strain because it clearly can do that.
It's not pseudo-science, and I'm not even sure why you said that. There's quite a bit of literature at this point demonstrating that the suprachiasmatic nucleus (the primary timekeeper of the body) is heavily entrained by specialized retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), that are most sensitive to blue wavelengths.
Here's a publicly-accessible review paper if you wish to learn more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254760/#BX1
I suppose that may affect sleep patterns in the short term but after several years of using exclusively 6500K lighting I don't have any problem falling asleep after turning-off the bedside lamp even though there's no graduated transition from 'blue' light to darkness.
I wanted to say that we stopped thinking of f.lux as a way to match a room about 8 years ago. We have been consumed with the idea that if the human circadian system is controlled by light, and if nobody knows what the numbers are in real life, then it is vitally important that we figure it out.
Our main effort since then has been about people and understanding how they react to light over time, and how technology can fix it. f.lux is intended to be a seed that will explain how all of our lighting can work better. It's a big project that extends beyond screens, and we think software is central to fixing the problem.
People who wake up at the same time need different timing and amounts of light, and it's not really about matching the color of a screen to a room. We've learned that almost every room is already too dim (during the day) or too bright (at night). And the trouble is that most people can't figure this out by looking around - they need some tools to help out.
This system that controls sleep and alertness is nonvisual, which means that everyone's intuition about what looks good might be pretty far off from what it does to your body. This certainly is borne out by the last 100 years of electric lighting.
Electric lighting has shifted sleep schedules by >4 hours, and people are not sleeping nearly as much as a result. We think this is connected to ADHD, cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, mood disorders, and many other serious problems.
So while it is true that other people have turned screens orange like f.lux did in 2009, the truth is we didn't do nearly enough back then. Our goal is to understand the biology and make something that actually works for a wide variety of people.
We have tried to address this question ("people, not screens") in little pieces, e.g., why we are making big changes to f.lux's schedule default settings on our "big update" page:
https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/v4/bigupdate/
But it is hard to talk about outcomes when nobody at all expects you to be thinking about them. Snake oil is not what we're about.
We have a lot of work to do -- apparently including a lot of writing and explaining, and I appreciate your support.
That's funny. All I want is having nice, soft colours when I'm up all night.
But imagine you get a job that requires you to be up at 8AM (and you want to take it). Do you have control of that part of your biology or does it have control of you?
The theory is that your environment is one of the major things controlling your biological timing, and the indoor spaces at least are ones we built so we should understand what it takes to change them.
I've personally found that I have a pretty heavy degree of control over it via the orexin† pathway: if I force myself to wake up and eat immediately for a few days at 8AM, then my body will associate 8AM with eating and shift everything else around (when I get hungry; when I get tired at night; etc.) to ensure I'll be wide awake at 8AM to "catch that meal" (that in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness was probably a rabbit or something.)
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orexin
One thing I've never figured out though, what's f.lux's business model? You two seem to be investing considerable resources into all of this for years on end, is it all charity?
In any case, thanks!
Is there an easier way to handle this? Perhaps some way to tell flux "I just woke up" and have it figure things out? Hook into a sleep tracker like on fitness trackers or Sleep as Android?
Seriously thank you so much for this project and all the effort that's gone in so far. I've been using it since about a month after first release and I cannot imagine using a computer without it.
Ios night shift isn’t nearly as good, and jailbreaking ios is much harder than formerly.
I suspect eating times are involved as well..
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23604485
E.g. meal timing might help you deal with jet lag, but remember that the primary problem in jet lag is the phase-shift of light in the first place.
Most likely the combined settings of some combination of my wake time and/or daylight savings time has something to do with it. I'm not sure. But before this last update, it always "just worked". And now that is no longer true.
That said, I still deeply miss the long-dead Nocturne for its “night vision mode”, which was perfect for working in the dead of night. Closest I can find to a good description: https://lifehacker.com/259154/enable-night-vision-mode-with-...
(E.g. on macOS and iPhone you can simply just set the daily time when Night Shift activates.)