It's pretty crappy (no autolocation, broken option processing, still barebones functionality). Doesn't seem actively developed, and definitely not trying to do better than redshift.
what I think is weird is with the command line tool (xflux) that once you start it, it tells you proc ID, and if you want to change the settings, you first have to kill the other process, or otherwise you get two xfluxes fighting over the colour adjustment, causing crazy disco flickering while the new one transitions.
I'd expect a tool like that to just tell the existing xflux process to change its settings.
I would say that changing color temperature based on time of day (and location on the planet) as a means to reduce late-night eyestrain and fatigue is something non-obvious, yes. I never even thought about color temperature and the influence of it on your sleeping patterns (esp. late at night) until the guy behind f.lux came by.
is it so non-obvious that it requires the state guarantee decades-long monopoly to ensure f.lux can make a return on the significant research & development costs?
could we expect no more non-obvious apps like f.lux get made if the state doesn't guarantee decades-long monopoly?
You've changed the question from "is the invention non-obvious, in the sense that current law requires to grand a patent?" to "do you agree with current patent laws and the value of patents?"
interestingly, f.lux is also free, at least for me. i use it yet haven't paid a dime. so it doesn't exactly look like they're trying to make a profit.. and i'm glad for that.
> […] changing color temperature based on time of day […] to reduce late-night eyestrain and fatigue is something non-obvious
There are themes for text editors which have both a day and night version (and some users will without a doubt have setup cron to switch automatically).
There are also blue-blocking filters recommended to wear at night for improving your sleep rhythm.
Of course none of this means that the f.lux author can’t obtain a patent on something related to his software. The question is if it will hold up if later disputed.
F.lux is a very good program, but you'll note that the 'research' section of their own page indicates that they didn't come up with the concept itself, and once you understand that blue light exposure distorts circadian rhythms, this particular implementation becomes rather obvious.
"Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title."
You misunderstand it. All of those things listed are "subject to the conditions and requirements of this title." The next few sections are about conditions and requirements. That's the important part.
...none of which would seem to apply. What's the prior art? It's defiantly non-obvious or someone would have done it decades ago - color screens have been around for a long time.
If you were thinking of something else, I kindly ask you to make a point, instead of asking me to prove a negative.
Color screens have been around a long time, but staring at them all day has only recently become common behavior. And the solution to a problem can be obvious even if the existence of the problem isn't obvious.
Contextual color-temp changing is nothing new at all. Putting a GUI wrapper on it and publishing for two dominant consumer platforms is real innovation I guess.
Indeed, back when I used to develop on a Windows box I swore by f.lux. I was very disappointed when I discovered the state of their Linux version after making the switch. Redshift is definitely the best alternative.
if you're using redshift, there is apparently a bug in the calculation.
So for now, you should it use it as redshift -l 28.6100:77.2300 -t 6000:4800 -m vidmode
where the first two numbers are your current locations latitude and longitude.
Oh wow, wonderful discussion :) I recently got a bit more understanding of colour spaces and colour temperature[0] and this is good reading.
So how about that patents and innovation? If f.lux was somehow patented they couldn't do this, two people collaborating like this to make colour temperature adjustment even more accurate.
Isn't the point of patents to protect investment in research or something? What does it say the investment if two people are perfectly willing to do this research for free :)
[0] the articles on http://scratchapixel.com/lessons/3d-basic-lessons/ have been the clearest explanation on CIE and sRGB and where that horseshoe shape comes from and all those things. they also got a really great explanation of colour temp and black body radiation
Yes, I'm from Copenhagen and I grabbed Copenhagen's latitude and longitude from Wikipedia and rounded to 4 decimals. Perhaps I, too, should take a look in Street View…
Dual monitors (Lenovo L1951p and L194 on Thinkpad W510 here) seems to work fine, at least on the 24 hour preview (you have to click the sinusoidal wave).
Shame it doesn't really work so well here. It forms dark vertical stripes on the screen, making small text ugly and hard to read. Oh well, I'll just use my monitor's controls which allow lowering to 4000K.
f.lux is one of my favorite pieces of software. It just does what it's supposed to and I hardly even think about it. Being near the 40th parallel, it rarely activates from April to October. At some point in October, as it did a week ago, it naturally and unobtrusively becomes indispensable again.
Something that happens quite frequently is non-technical friends see my laptop at night and ask "why it is orange?". When I temporarily deactivate f.lux, they shrink from the intrusive blue light and need no further explanation.
Agreed. I've noticed a pretty significant improvement in my sleep patterns since I started using it. I used to have trouble "tearing myself away" from the computer at night, and I'd often stay up way too late just staring at my screen and not really doing much of anything—just sort of spinning my wheels. That rarely seems to happen any more.
There's no need to donate; they'll start extracting cash from customers pretty soon!
f.lux is patent pending. If you make a cell phone, display, or other cool device, and want to talk about licensing f.lux? Email us: justgetflux@gmail.com
f.lux is an awesome little thing I had installed for months. Then on the excitement of moving to a new place, I removed it. And I could stay awake thru the night again. So it wasn't old age after all. Now I will put it back again.
I use f.lux and think it's great. I recently started taking a small amount (~1.5mg) of melatonin after reading a post[0] by Gwern and the accompanying discussion on HN[1]. I find that taking it ~30 minutes before I want to go to bed makes it much, much easier to "tear myself away" from the computer, book, etc. and go to bed.
Bright blue light disturbs your natural sleepishness feeling (melatonin/etc), so the need to sleep is felt as, say, exhaustion which is different and comes later.
> Something that happens quite frequently is non-technical friends see my laptop at night and ask "why it is orange?"
This, very much; if you just have it on for a while, you don't notice it yourself. There was a time years ago when it would transition rather quickly so you could see when it turned on, but that's a setting you can turn off so it goes reeeeally smoothly. I hardly notice it now. Maybe sometimes when I turn on a game it will flicker back to normal for a little bit. But yeah, I hardly notice it (which is good), but others do. Funny.
I have tried using f.lux several times as it is a recurring theme on HN, but it just does not work for me. All it does is give everything a red tinge, but the light intensity remains the same. I feel like it is cooking my eyeballs and blurring my vision.
I have working alternatives now neither of which work well with multi-screens and neither of which are sophisticated as f.lux, but they do reduce the intensity of my screens which is what I want.
One is "Dimmer" which I use on my left screen and the other is the built in Nvidia tool to reduce brightness, contrast/gamma etc, which I use on my right screen. Pretty primitive but works for me.
That is the point; it's all about color temperature, and not about brightness. If you feel like you're cooking your eyeballs, perhaps your screen brightness is just too high.
f.lux only changes the color temperature and that is what I use it for. Changing the display brightness is easy: just use the brightness adjustment keys on the keyboard. I set my display brightness as low as possible, while still keeping the screen easy to read.
It took me a while to get used to it - I found I had to start out with minimal settings and slowly turn them up. I find I can sleep much faster now with it.
I just installed it and tried your suggestion of dropping to 5900K. After about an hour I reverted to normal for a moment and was shocked by how harsh the light from screen was.
I have to say that I prefer the warmer color tones regardless of daytime and lighting, which is why I have f.lux always set to 5000K - unless I need accurate colors - and even warmer during the dark hours.
Otherwise and without f.lux I tend to get occasional headaches and my eyes fatigue after long days spent at the computer.
There's also the OS's color-calibration/color-profile generation utility, which will usually let you set both gamma and temperature however you like them.
Try redshift instead, you can use it from the terminal. If you want it to change according to time of day use redshift -l lon:lat. i.e longitude and latitude of current position. But you can also use redshift -O to set a specific level. I often use redshift -O 3500
When my friends have asked "why is it orange?" I've launched into an explanation of how blue light at night is unnatural and causes insomnia. Somehow, I hadn't thought of just temporarily deactivating f.lux and letting them see for themselves!
Modified the text to say, yes, this is our Windows update. Many of the features are on Mac already, since we've done a dozen updates for it in the interim. But we're planning another Mac update soon.
What are the odds we'd see a Linux update at some point in the future? I loved flux when I was running Windows, but at this point I'm fully off in Ubuntu land and haven't been had much luck getting flux to work right here. :(
I didn't like redshift as much when I tried it a year-ish ago. The version I tried made me enter all the GPS coordinates manually and I never felt like it achieved the same effect as well.
Hard to run a neat tool like f.lux when you design for the web. Reason being that I need to "see" the web like my clients and their customers do. Same reason I don't run ad-blockers, or many browser add-ons that modify the browsing experience.
I found when using it for personal use, there are times when the time of day, doesn't align with my energy levels and I ended up disabling it enough that it became a nuisance.
Given the huge variation in (mis)calibrated settings on top of the huge variation of displays themselves, you'd probably be fine running f.lux. In fact, I would think you would want a more flexible tool so you can actually test what different users might be seeing given different display configurations.
I agree for the most part, however when I'm at the design phase I'm generally working from required brand palettes or using swatches I've defined so I know the colors are good.
Maybe I'm Doing It Wrong™, but I design all the time with F.lux in this manner and don't have any problems.
The discussion is around web design / development - a field with an extremely high number of people running OSX (I'd say that the majority run OSX, but I don't have any statistics to back that up, just observation).
No, the discussion is around web design clients, the majority of whom in my experience run IE6 on Windows XP at 800x600 with the brightness turned up to 11.
Working on calibrated equipment is about having a neutral, uniform reference so that you can actually see what you're doing without having to second guess yourself. You can draw an analogy to reference monitors for sound mixing. Monitors have two properties: they reveal detail in the sound and they have a flat frequency response. The former is obviously important, and it's why as a designer you should have a nice monitor. The latter is important so that when you work in different locations, you don't have to recalibrate your expectations. There may also be non-linear perceptual illusions associated with certain aspects of the signal being attenuated or boosted, which would be another reason to have a calibrated/flat reference, but I'm not certain if this would be relevant at the scale we're talking about (between calibrated and the whole space of non-calibrated color profiles).
There are color management solutions for Windows and Linux as well -- the important part is that you calibrate your display (or other output device) to create an ICC profile, and that there's a way to install the ICC profile. (Example: http://www.lightroomforums.net/showthread.php?14070)
It's true that ICC profiles don't get you much if everyone involved doesn't have a calibrated display. And many users don't. That said, it's still valuable as a baseline and when working with other designers.
You've taken this too far. My point was that while it's possible for me to modify my experience to my liking, I keep as many "defaults" as possible so as to have as close to the same experience as my clients and their customers.
f.lux has a suspend for an hour function for when you're doing color sensitive work. You can also turn it off entirely if you'd like. I don't do photo editing or anything majorly graphical with it on.
Agreed on both counts. I got tired of hitting "suspend for an hour" every single goddamn hour, so I had to tell it I live somewhere in the middle of nowhere. that aligns more with my ideal sleep habits.
Being wary of using too much resources in my own programs I'm always a little surprised and disappointed when I see small utility programs like this use resources like a drunken sailor on shore leave. Flux is currently using 118 MB of real memory and 0.1% CPU.
Using otool -L /Applications/Flux.app/Contents/MacOS/Flux you can see an impressive number of frameworks included. I guess inclusion of the webkit framework is the biggest culprit. Why all this is needed to simply dim the light on my screen is beyond me.
That said, Flux is perfect functionality wise and very useful.
The reason for WebKit is to be able to show a Google Maps frame to help people choose their location to get a more accurate sunrise/sunset. Not sure if that level of accuracy is necessary.
That said, the vast majority of OS X apps will link against the WebKit framework; not just Safari, but also Adium, Tweetbot, Mail.app, Growl, Notes, TextMate, iTunes, etc. It's pretty much guaranteed that it's in memory already, so there's no harm linking against it.
As for memory, ps reports about 64 MB of RSS; Activity Monitor reports 47.5 MB of memory used. Seems okay to me.
I'm using the latest Mountain Lion 10.8.5. On second though, I think I know what is going on.
First, linking with the webkit framework is not the problem, using the framework is. I was playing around with preferences and also location. As you say, this is when the Webkit frameworks kicks in, which might explain the memory blowup to 118MB.
Second, I seem to recall that modern OS allocators are reluctant to release memory back to the OS (pool) unless required (when available memory is low) hence the process appears to use more memory than what it actual might be using. When I just restart Flux without fiddling with preferences, memory usage stays at around 45MB. I still think this is way too high if you think about what the program is doing, but given the above, even if Activity Manager reports that Flux is using 45MB, it might not really use 45MB now, only at some point.
I remember I used Xcode's instruments to investigate my program and could then see that the real active memory used by the process was usually much less than what Activity Manager, top, and ps w/friends were reporting. So a large part of the memory the process is currently holding (45MB) might be released back to the OS if needed, I think. If someone has more details on this, please elaborate.
Edit: Flux is also running with 4 threads(!) which of course also adds to the process memory usage. Isn't a thread stack around 4-8 MB?
Also, Flux appears to use 0.1% CPU continuously which is sloppy since CPU usage can be remedied by putting (nano)sleep in the poll cycle to make it use zero CPU.
It's command-line, like the Linux version, which means it's very lightweight. It's using 0% CPU (looks like 4 seconds of CPU over the last week or two), but it does seem to use 111 MB memory -- I'm curious why and might poke at it. (Yay free software.)
wyvern:~/src/redshift/redshift-1.7/src gthomas$ otool -L redshift
redshift:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/CoreGraphics (compatibility version 64.0.0, current version 600.0.0)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 169.3.0)
That's a great idea. I don't use homebrew myself, so that didn't occur to me. I'll try emailing the upstream author first and see if they want it, and submit to homebrew if I don't hear back.
To get redshift to run at login, we'll use launchd. Save the following as ~/Library/LaunchAgents/redshift.plist (modify as needed if your binary and config files are elsewhere).
When we recompiled for 64-bit/universal (from 32-bit before), f.lux's RAM usage went from 6MB to 29MB (but Apple requested that we change it, so we did.) You could probably set f.lux to run in 32-bit mode and have the old footprint.
CoreLocation is an important feature for us, and we have to include a map and a Javascript host to access Google's geolocation service at all. There is no more reliable way than Webkit.
We've considered breaking into a daemon and a GUI, which would also allow us to make a preference pane, but it's a lot of work for not much benefit.
It's using 0.7 mb on my Surface Pro. However, its 6.15pm right now, maybe usage goes up when it actually starts dimming. I've never had noticeable performance issues because of it though, and I run it on my 7 year old Macbook Pro as well.
f.lux is great, but I really really really wish it would allow custom control of the timing instead of pegging to sunset. I don't want my screen going red at 4:30 pm in the winter eight or more hours before bed. 10 pm would be about right. f.lux can be manually controlled, but that's much less useful since I'll never remember to turn it back to red at the times I want. "Disable for an hour" is useful once, and really tedious to repeat for six hours.
And in this update: "Movie mode ... lasts 2½ hours." Seriously? Why in the world not prompt for a time duration, or use a dropdown or flyout menu for various 30 minute intervals?
Just set your location to a place that's more compatible with your schedule. Living on the east coast, I get fine results setting it to a southern California zip code.
Awesome project, thank you!! It would be helpful if the creators listed the latest version number on their site so folks don't need to install it to see if it's e.g: version 23.0 or something else. FYI: the latest version seems to be 23.0 for mac at the moment.
An official Flux build exists for iOS, but you need to jailbreak. I used it before I upgraded to iOS 7 and it has been massively useful for me. It's the one thing I miss most from my jailbreak.
I would imagine it would have to be baked into the OS (if not jailbroken) as I presume you'd want it to affect the display and all applications. But I completely agree, I love f.lux on my computer. The only downside is I feel the need to sleep very quickly if I try and work at night :)
Every time I go to update to legit IO7 I think, oh yea, but F.lux. Apple seems inspired enough to bake the good jailbreaks in, except for this one essential (for me) tweak.
The Iphone was a revolutionary product and a great tool, but I'm pretty sure it's also responsible for millions of hours of lost sleep due to late night blue light. C'mon Apple start forward thinking again and let us have this as an accessibility option at least.
I send feedback every single time IOS gets an update, hope others will too.
I really wish someone would put f.lux in a TV or receiver. Sure, it's not ideal for critical viewing, but it'd be great for casual tv watching/gaming at night. Anyone found good solutions for that? I tried amber glasses but it's a bit of an awkward solution and somehow doesn't feel as effective as f.lux.
Would lowering the blue light in the TV's picture settings and the brightness accomplish everything f.lux does?
My LG TV has an ambient light sensor which will adjust the brightness of the TV. One issue is that when the TV first turns on the default (or prior) brightness is often brighter than the sensor detects. Seconds after powering on, the TV will darken which if you hadn't seen the brighter version would seem normal (guests have asked if the TV is broken after witnessing this)
At night (up with a sick kid) the feature is great and you couldn't imagine watching TV at night without it.
What sort of amber glasses? I've heard great feedback about Gunnar Optiks, though I've never tried them myself (for more than 30 seconds) and they're not very cheap. http://www.gunnars.com/
Disclaimer: I have met people from Gunnar a few times and I know one of their marketing agencies very well - but have never been paid by Gunnar for anything :)
I hear so much about f.lux, but to me I don't know if the science quite backs it up like everyone says it does. I've found it suffers from the, "They used the word science so it must be good" problem.
Why hasn't anyone done a study on specifically what f.lux attempts to do? Sure, light at night causes people problems sleeping, but does f.lux actually make a difference? Can we quantify that difference in a way that controls for the fanboy (formerly known as placebo) effect?
>Effects of LED-backlit computer screen and emotional selfregulation on human melatonin production.
>[...] Finally, we can also report that the blue light of LED-backlit computer screen significantly suppress melatonin production (91%) more than red light (78%) and no light (44%).
sigh Fine, here are more articles. If you don't want to believe in peer-reviewed academic literature, I'm not sure why I'm bothering. Statistically significant results can be obtained with few participants. Behold the power of math.
Nocturnal light exposure impairs affective responses in a wavelength-dependent manner.
>Our results demonstrate that exposure to LAN influences behavior and neuronal plasticity and that this effect is likely mediated by ipRGCs. Modern sources of LAN that contain blue wavelengths may be particularly disruptive to the circadian system, potentially contributing to altered mood regulation.
Out of the lab and into the bathroom: evening short-term exposure to conventional light suppresses melatonin and increases alertness perception.
>Subjective alertness was significantly increased after exposure to three of the lighting conditions which included blue spectral components in their spectra. Evening exposure to conventional lamps in an everyday setting influences melatonin excretion and alertness perception within 30 min.
Non-visual effects of light on melatonin, alertness and cognitive performance: can blue-enriched light keep us alert?
Exposure to light at 6500K induced greater melatonin suppression, together with enhanced subjective alertness, well-being and visual comfort. With respect to cognitive performance, light at 6500K led to significantly faster reaction times in tasks associated with sustained attention (Psychomotor Vigilance and GO/NOGO Task), but not in tasks associated with executive function (Paced Visual Serial Addition Task).
[...]
Our findings suggest that the sensitivity of the human alerting and cognitive response to polychromatic light at levels as low as 40 lux, is blue-shifted relative to the three-cone visual photopic system. Thus, the selection of commercially available compact fluorescent lights with different colour temperatures significantly impacts on circadian physiology and cognitive performance at home and in the workplace.
i'm impressed with someone's ability to ask for someone else to do research, and then be snooty when someone finds it for them. I thought that the effects of blue light on circadian rhythms was clear-cut, popular knowledge.
This trickery may work on Reddit (I know you're from Reddit because you use carets to denote quotations), but allow me to repeat myself:
Why hasn't anyone done a study on specifically what f.lux attempts to do? Sure, light at night causes people problems sleeping, but does f.lux actually make a difference? Can we quantify that difference in a way that controls for the fanboy (formerly known as placebo) effect?
Haha, what? That is the most bizarre insult? argument? that I've seen in a while. People use greater-than characters all the time for quotations. It's been used in email forever. But bonus points for trying to be edgy I guess.
To your question: All the studies are basically examining the principle that f.lux operates on. Shift colors away from blue and you can limit the decrease in melatonin production. I don't understand your question?
If you mean, "why has no one done a study on f.lux itself?", then I'm assuming no one has done a study on f.lux per se because (I'm just guessing here) no serious academic researcher really gives two shits about a piece of software on the internet.
However, that doesn't mean their research cannot be applied. F.lux is applied science, working on a fairly solid base of academic research. Real science with, yunno, quantifiable and statistically significant results. It isn't "fanboyism" or "science"...it is peer-reviewed literature.
The articles I linked specifically talk about how spectral blue light decreases melatonin production (a hormone directly related to how sleepy you feel at night) and a corresponding increase in alertness.
Doing a little extrapolation, if you decrease the amount of blue light that you are exposed to in the evening you decrease the impact on melatonin production and increased alertness.
So sure, I doubt anyone has stuck a person in front of f.lux and measured salivatory melatonin levels...but they have done the equivalent with blue and red lights. It isn't reaching to say that f.lux is doing exactly the same thing.
Did you know monitors leak anywhere from some to a lot of white light, depending on age and quality (if you turn off the lights in your computer room some time and load up a black page, is it completely dark in the room? Ever wonder why not?)? F.lux can't change the color of that light, and so the question becomes: is that leaked white light enough to negate the benefit seen in the studies?
So I bet you can imagine my persistent confusion with your linking to what amount to irrelevant studies, when this question is the one I've been asking over and over again. When you say "have done the equivalent with blue and red lights", you are absolutely, 100% wrong. It is extremely reaching to say that F.lux is doing the same thing, if you know how monitors work.
> "Melatonin is a circadian hormone transmitted via suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus and sympathetic nervous system to the pineal gland. It is a hormone necessary to many human functions such as immune, cardiovascular, neuron and sleep/awake functions. Since melatonin enhancement or suppression is reported to be closely related to the photic information from retina, in this paper, we aim further to study both the lighting condition and the emotional self-regulation in different lighting conditions together with their effects on the production of human melatonin. In this experiment, five participants are in three light exposure conditions by LED backlit computer screen..."
I don't see anyone saying it's irrefutable. It's a conference proceeding, which means it's essentially a progress report on a line of research. And small sample sizes can produce compelling evidence if there is a large effect size observed, particularly with the objective physiological measures (subjective psychometrics are much more susceptible to bias). This research is also likely to be supported by other studies, making this essentially replication of an observed effect.
Look up how blue led light can disrupt sleeping. Ever notice how bright blue led is compared to others (red, yellow)? My cable modem has blue leds for the indicator lights, and in a dark room, it is amazing how bright they are.
f.lux makes your monitor use less of the blue components of light and more of the reds. It will make your screen look funny till you get used to it, which takes minutes. To really see what it does, in a darkened room, turn off f.lux
It doesn't "remove brightness magically", it just swings the color temperature of ALL colors displayed towards the red end of the spectrum, which studies have shown can decrease the inhibition of melatonin production which means you will be more likely to get sleepy around the time you're supposed to, whereas before you might not have until much later and disturbed your sleep.
What aren't you getting about this? There is leakage of white unfiltered light that comes from from most monitors (the super duper high quality monitors boast about low light leakage, but they still do it a bit). F.lux cannot possibly change the color temperature of this light. So my question is and has been, does that leakage have enough of an impact to negate the effects of F.lux? That's the question worth answering, because if it's, "No, the effects are negated by the white light leakage", then there's absolutely no point in using F.lux whatsoever.
That light is negligible. I have used F.lux for years, I swear by it, and if I bring an iPad or iPhone to bed and stare at it a while before I sleep (note: don't do this), I can totally notice the difference. (Then again I have a diagnosed sleep disorder and have to be extra careful about these things.)
The LCD in your monitor is a filter, that controls what colors from the white back-light reach your eyes.
It is not completely effective - when the LCD is set to block all colors, there is some white-ish leakage as you say. A completely red shape on an LCD would still have some blue in it from the leakage. We perceive color and brightness relative to the other colors close by.
Flux shifts the color balance of the screen towards red at night. After your eyes get used to it, the colors look about right, but the LCD is in fact blocking a higher proportion of blue than normal.
What it does not do is change the brightness of the screen - this is usually done by changing the intensity of the backlight. It is bad for you to look at a screen that is either too bright or too dark for the room you are in, so this is best done with an actual light sensor.
Here is a thread about doing that, but neither of the programs in it work very well. If you fancy making an open source program to do this, you'll be my hero :-)
When your monitor is displaying a white image, lots of white light is coming out. When your monitor is displaying a red image, lots of red light is coming out. F.lux makes white images tinged red. F.lux isn't about removing brightness in general.
Your clarification is confusing me even more, I don't understand what your confusion is at all.
When your monitor is displaying a red image, red light is coming out, but so is white light, because your monitor is not 100% light sealed. The backlight in your monitor is leaking through the edges of your LED screen.
So the question becomes, is that leaked white light enough to disrupt your sleep? No one's done any studies on this question, no one's looked into it, and so until they do, F.lux's effectiveness remains in question.
None of what you just said refutes any of the following: "When your monitor is displaying a white image, lots of white light is coming out. When your monitor is displaying a red image, lots of red light is coming out. F.lux makes white images tinged red. F.lux isn't about removing brightness in general."
Lets get some basics out of the way here, since you seem to be confused about either what "white", "blue", and "red" light is, or you seem to be confused about what f.lux actually does.
"red" light is light that consists largely or entirely of visible light with long wavelengths. "blue" light is light that consists largely or entirely of visible light with short wavelengths. "white light" is light that contains a good but not necessarily perfect mix of all visible wavelengths.
When you decrease the color temperature of an image, you are reducing the amount of short wavelength light, not eliminating it. LCD imperfection is frankly irrelevant as some short wavelength light is still coming through by design. If you removed all short wavelength light you would just be left with reds and blacks. That isn't what f.lux does, or claims to do.
> "So the question becomes, is that leaked white light enough to disrupt your sleep? No one's done any studies on this question"
Many studies have been done on the effects of different intensities of short wavelength light on sleep. This research isn't binary "blue light or zero blue light" For example, any of the studies which include an incandescent bulb cover this. Incandescent bulbs are black body radiators, they emit short wavelength light and long wavelength light, however the proportion of short to long wavelength light that they emit is much different from what florescent bulbs emit. (Specifically, light from incandescent bulbs is said to be "warmer").
By the way, one of polyfractal's links is to a study that used LCDs as the light source. Try reading before making an ass out of yourself.
The difference I use Redshift for is how much my eyes hurt at night the second I turn it off and everything shifts bluer. Whether or not it changes my sleeping patterns, I cannot say, but it is more pleasant at least.
>Movie mode. This setting warms up your display, but it preserves shadow detail, skintones, and sky colors better than f.lux’s typical colors. It lasts 2½ hours, which lets you watch most feature films
Colours perceived as "warmer" (yellows, reds etc) are produced at lower wavelength and therefore by a blackbody with lower temperature (hence colour temperature). F.lux is reducing the temperature, thus producing a "warmer" hue.
I start work before 6:00 AM and f.lux is a godsend. I actually feel my body go aahhhh as the sun comes up outside the window and my screen shifts to blue.
Twilight seems to get it wrong - all the blacks become red. (I think it does this by overlaying red on top of everything instead of doing real hue shifting)
Are there any other recommended mobile apps out there?
"Lux isn't your ordinary brightness app. It intelligently adjusts the brightness of your display based on the environment you're in. If you step into a dimly lit room, Lux will automatically lower the brightness of your display to make it not only comfortable to read, but to also preserve battery power."
Hmm, I had noticed that the blacks become red, but I didn't think of it as "wrong". Despite that, I find it useful enough -- it still removes much of the blue light and makes my eyes feel better.
I would love to know about any better Android apps like this, though.
Lux can do a better job, if you also install the Nexus 4 plugin from the same developer. Of course, you'll need a Nexus 4. If you don't have one it still does the same sort of transparent overlay.
As someone who has used f.lux for the last few years (and more so after I've started classes), any single one of these is a welcome update. Together? I'll take it as a late birthday present.
The only thing that annoys me about f.lux is the lack of flexibility. Why can I only disable it for one hour? Why are there only two transition speeds - 20s and 60m?
the alt-pg up/dwn feature to adjust brightness is pretty great. the fact that it rolls back in the morning is pretty clever, i always found myself having to fidget with settings on my monitor.
I'm speaking as a colorist working in film/television here. TV's already have enough issues destroying the look we carefully craft with "features" like dynamic lighting, motion smoothing, vivid mode, etc. A huge color shift is going to throw this off even more and dramatically change the look and tone to the detriment of the work. This is great for reading text on a screen, but should be disabled for viewing media - you wouldn't look at the Mona Lisa with amber glasses.
Often the creator does not have all that much control over how their work is consumed. (And I guess it's not worse than reading a novel in a loud room, in some sense.)
I cannot watch TV with any sort of motion smoothing enabled. When watching other people's TV's I usually offer to "fix" the image, but in the end most prefer it enabled.
It is pretty great, however it cannot be changed to another key combination and if you happen to use that particular shortcut in some other apps (cough OneNote cough) you're pretty much screwed.
They used to. My grandfather had ancient color TV when I was very young that used a photo sensor to adjust itself to the room lighting's color balance.
They still do in that they can automatically adjust brightness based on light environments. Just brightness / backlight setting though, not colors or anything. I have it turned off and have it set to the lowest, given how it's still too bright even if my room is pretty dark.
I remember first looking at this, and thinking it was pretty stupid. I downloaded it out of curiousity and ran it on my work machine while doing a few late nights, and I noticed very quickly that my eyes were feeling a lot less tired near the end of a day than they usually were.
Now, I install it on every machine I use, and it's probably saved me a ton of (literal) headaches. I couldn't recommend it enough.
Dumb question: does changing the image on the screen actually change the output of blue light? I was kind of under the impression it was a result of the light source.
For example I think neon light is actually greenish and it is just the human eye that adjusts the colors back to normal. But I don't think one could make neon light behave like another type of light simply by painting it with some color.
Yes it does. Your screen, presuming it's LED, is white light being filtered through colored gates (pixels). It is... easy to tune the colors of those gates...
For people who love f.lux, you may be interested to check out the work of Philippe Rahm: http://philipperahm.com/. He's built a number of spaces that explore how environmental conditions affect you physiologically. Along the lines of f.lux, he has some experiments that use specific qualities of light to affect your circadian rhythm, including an iPhone app and JavaScript library: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/i-weather.org/id389364795?mt....
This is a great example of where avant-garde art can be an inspiration for mass-market products, though who knows if the f.lux creators were directly or indirectly influenced by Rahm's work. Nevertheless, I believe there's a whole range of products that could come out of this conceptual framework.
Might not be what this piece of software was created, but could a similar technique be used for an opposite effect: waking up in the morning? There are morning lights available that send 10.000 lux light, could you get a monitor to do this instead? would it have the same effect as those lights?
I do believe f.lux also can increase (blue-shift) the color balance on your screen during the day; my setting goes up to 6500K. Not sure if that's higher than the normal color temperature though.
I'm not sure if it's light intensity or color, myself. I do know that Philips is doing a lot of research in the area. If you have a Philips light that can change color (or can get one), turn it up to bright blue in the morning, and a pleasant / warm red in the evening. That should help.
I for one wouldn't mind a shifting color setup at home. Maybe I'll buy myself one of those lights sometime. Right now I mainly have reddish lights (woo, Lidl), but also because I mainly have lights on in the evening. And I don't generally have issues waking up in the morning. At least not once I'm out of bed, :p.
Neat. Flux has been one of my favorite tools for years. There have been times that I have had to use its "disable for an hour" function late at night and the sudden brightness change is actually painful. It's easy to forget just how bright monitors are.
WARNING: If you want to try this for the first time, wait until mid-day. The first transition is quite jarring, but trying it in the day will make it much smoother (to the point where, if you disable it at night, you will quickly curse and re-enable it).
Just yesterday I was in the office late and was struggling with the bright monitor in a dimming room. The reminder that this software exists comes at a very nice time of year for those north of the tropics.
I use f.lux all the time (on OS X). The only thing that frustrates me about it, is that "disable for an hour" actually means "use daytime settings for an hour". I reduced the daytime temperature to 4500K, but when I need to do graphical work, I want flux to disable completely. And yes, I know, I can simply quit the app, but then I forget to re-enable it.
The technology is patent-pending, so I suspect they want f.lux as widely used as possible so they can license the patent to device makers for a lot of money once they are well-known enough.
I know an update isn't available for OS X yet, but did anyone else get notified of an upgrade of their OS X version? The most recent OS X version of the Flux.app file says it was created Oct 4, 2013. I'm pretty sure this update has caused my Macbook Air to hang momentarily when trying to put it to sleep. Kind of annoying.
If you find yourself not able to fall asleep until later than you'd like, I recommend trying the warmer flux setting. I've been using RedScreen + a little script I wrote instead of flux because it gets far redder, and for me works far better.
It looks like flux still only goes down to 2200 on Mac, so I may continue using RedScreen.
I used to use this but my issue was that I usually watch TV/Movies on my laptop before bed. I had to disable flux to do that which made it kind of pointless for me. During my time using it I never noticed any benefits (probably because, like I said, I turned it off late at night).
Why do you have to disable flux to do that? Try looking at your phone after using your fluxed(?) laptop for an hour or so. The blue will burn your eyes out...
I think it has made a difference for me. Since I started using it I've noticed that I don't have major trouble getting to sleep if I've just finished working on my laptop, which can be a problem for me.
Also, I have been turning the brightness right down on most of my non-flux devices (including my TV) because the light is harsh.
Well, "Movie Mode" is not the same as "Disable f.lux". But are you saying that the only thing you do on your laptop after the sun goes down is watch movies?
Looked into movie mode - seems like what I'm looking for.
>> "But are you saying that the only thing you do on your laptop after the sun goes down is watch movies?"
No :) The reason I used flux was to help improve my sleep. I thought disabling flux for a couple of hours before bed (even if I used it during the previous dark hours) would negate the benefit. I'm not exactly sure if that's true but movie mode sounds like the solution.
I teach a class at Arizona State University and one of my students asked why my laptop screen was pink. I then proceeded to give the class a 10 minute sales pitch on f.lux and how blue light inhibits melatonin production. It still surprises me what a profound sales channel raving fans can be.
> A simple schedule for Philips Hue, so you can f.lux your house
You can pair your Philips Hue bulbs with f.lux! This is awesome! This kind of thing is very helpful for people who sleep odd hours or just have trouble going to sleep and waking up. Has anyone tried this or knows how it works?
I just tried out the f.lux for Philips Hue feature and it is highly impractical because it arbitrarily adjusts the brightness of all Hue lights in your house...
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of LampShade.io, an Android app for the Hue that has a similar feature (and many others too)
I've been wearing orange tinted safety glasses to reduce my exposure to blue light at night. Is there a good option that's more suited to wearing outside the home/hackerspace? Rose colored glasses, of course, but with better peripheral coverage?
Just a heads up: f.lux is a great tool, but remember to turn it off during video games. Your experience with some games can be affected by the temperature of your screen. For me, that was definitely true when playing left4dead2.
Maybe I'm just weird but I previously tried flux for a few days and hated it. I can always tell the colors are wrong and it drives me crazy. At no point did my brain adjust to white being red.
It took some time to get used to, but now I don't even notice it. Totally worth the adjustment period. New people always seem to comment how orange/warm my screen looks.
I was interested in using the expanded range, but it needs to access administrator privileges which I can't use on my locked-down work laptop. The normal version is a lifesaver though!
Is this supposed to become a commercial product? I'm confused about their business model, if any. If they don't have one, an open-source approach would be more common. Any ideas?
Neon lights in an office? I'm used to neon in bars/pubs, but I haven't heard of neon being used for general purpose lighting. That sounds painful, neon lights are generally very harsh in my experience.
Why not use something like Calise[1], which dims the screen based a camera plugged in? Even if it's a desktop, plugging in a cheap webcam and pointing it at a wall/ceiling doesn't seem very onerous.
I wonder how it could work if done properly based on data such as cloud cover. One thing that annoyed me to no end on my TouchPad was the auto dimming based on ambient lighting. This would rapidly dim in and out as I sat on the bus trying to read an ebook as it would catch every shadow etc.
iOS devs, please submit radars to Apple for iOS support without jailbreak. (IDGAF whether it’s native or third-party support for changing the whitepoint, I just don’t want my phone to blind me at night.)
http://jonls.dk/redshift/
https://launchpad.net/redshift