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Phones need 'bed mode' to protect sleep
- DrScump 11y agoAnybody know if f.lux is working on an Android version? Their FAQ is mute on the issue.
- buro9 11y agoTwilight on Android works well.
- ChanceTheCoder 11y agoThere is something like f.lux for Android. It's called Twilight.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y agoTwilight seems less thorough than f.lux and more like a simple filter. When f.luxs runs on my desktop, the blacks are still black. On Twilight, they get a red tint to them.
- DrScump 11y agoTwilight's permissions requirements include device and application history, bookmarks, etc. Why would that be necessary?
- tasqa 11y agoLux is also an great option for Android!
- lcswi 11y agoI switched from twilight to cf.lumen the other day, it's vastly better as it properly colors your screen.
- dnlrn 11y agoCyanogenMod has something equal to f.lux already built in. It's called LiveDisplay.
- andrewaylett 11y agoAnd it's great, because it doesn't just switch on time of day and location, but also appears to use the RGB sensor to try to match the white point of the screen with the colour of the light in the room. It's especially nice with Android's adaptive auto-brightness and an OLED screen.
- wodenokoto 11y agoWhile I do think my Mac is overly blue, I also think that f.lux is ridiculously yellow. I've turned down the yellowness considerably compared to the defaults, and still find myself turning it off in the evening, because suddenly everything becomes washy yellow.
- stdbrouw 11y agoDo you have it set so that it changes colors gradually? It's much easier to get used to if you have it change over the course of an hour instead of instantly.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoIt seems to be worse with the modern f.lux mode than classic f.lux.
- jacobolus 11y agoIf you allow your eyes to adapt, the yellowness really isn’t a big deal, unless you’re doing something color sensitive like making art. Just stop worrying about precisely what colors are on screen. Even if you’re casually looking at photographs, watching a television show, or playing a game, your eyes can compensate pretty well for a significant reduction in the amount of blue light, and you can have a perfectly acceptable experience. Note, you’ll also want to dim or turn off other lights at night. In particular white LEDs of CCT ≥4000K are terrible at night, both wrecking night vision and disrupting sleep rhythm. If you’re in an otherwise dark room, you can turn your display brightness as low as it will go and turn f.lux to its orangest possible setting and still browse the web, answer emails, write code, etc. perfectly fine. At such an extreme setting you might not be able to effectively enjoy photographs or movies anymore, but maybe right before bed isn’t the best time to look at photographs anyway.
- wodenokoto 11y agoWhy would it not be good to look at pictures before bed?
- mcintyre1994 11y ago
- tasqa 11y agoFor Linux users I can highly recommend Redshift[1]. The color temperature settings seem to differ some from f.lux but everything else works great! [1] http://jonls.dk/redshift/ http://jonls.dk/redshift/
- Mahn 11y agoNot just for Linux users: If you are using f.lux on windows but wish that you could control the temperate on demand (rather than it being automatic according to the current time) switch to Redshift and don't look back.
- jacinda 11y agoAnd yet Apple recently forced f.lux to take down the sideloaded version of their iOS app despite the fact that they have no public APIs available to do what f.lux does. See here: https://justgetflux.com/sideload/#notanymore https://justgetflux.com/sideload/#notanymore HN Posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10556375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10556375
- walterbell 11y agoKudos to the BBC for increasing awareness of this issue with non-technical device users, who will need manufacturers to implement bedtime mode as a factory-installed feature. Previous industries have sold products with negative health impacts, with changes eventually coming from consumer pushback, government regulation and/or class-action lawsuits. There must be at least one mainstream device manufacturer who has a large advertising budget and can take a leadership position by implementing bedtime mode and advertising the health benefits.
- allencoin 11y agoI haven't done any mobile development, so forgive my ignorance. But the concept of a program not being "allowed" on my device is bizarre to me.
- mrweasel 11y agoOr you could just put the phone/tablet/computer aside an hour or two before bedtime. It's probably not a popular solution, people get defensive when you suggest they put their phone away.
- spuz 11y agoPeople get addicted to their phones to the point that it disrupts their sleep and harms their health. A bed mode is not going to change that. People need to recognise the damage their habits are doing and work to change them.
- jacobolus 11y agoActually a bed mode will make a substantial difference. Looking at phones or laptops or whatever screens at nighttime suppresses melatonin, which leads to people not feeling sleepy when they should, which makes them much more likely to continue looking at their screen than if they became as tired as normal. It’s certainly possible to stay up doing something without blue light (e.g. reading by candlelight or a dim incandescent flashlight), but blue light makes a huge difference, and actively fights people’s ability to exercise self control. Working to change habits is all well and good, but instead of telling someone who habitually binges on candy and cookies to stop eating any snacks at all, period, it would be a more successful intervention to take the candy and cookies away and fill their refrigerator with carrot sticks.
- spuz 11y agoIn my experience, using a screen colour app just encourages me to use my phone more not less. Even with these apps a phone will still emit a large amount of blue light and having the light source so close to my face I still notice it disrupts my sleep. If you believe using your phone late at night is harmful to you at all then why continue to maintain a that behaviour? Wouldn't it be much more beneficial to your health to avoid screens altogether at night? I'm not saying that it is easy but I believe it's a good healthy goal to aim for just like getting exercise and eating well. To your point about unhealthy eating habits I totally agree. I just don't see phone addiction normally talked about as often as diet and exercise which is why I wanted to mention it.
- jacobolus 11y ago> If you believe using your phone late at night is harmful to you at all If you’re asking about me personally, I don’t use a smartphone at night. I thought we were talking about what actions smartphone vendors could take to help their customers’ health. > Even with these apps a phone will still emit a large amount of blue light and having the light source so close to my face I still notice it disrupts my sleep. If you use f.lux on a Mac, you can make it incredibly orange almost completely blocking out the "blue" channel on the display. It also includes a "darkroom" mode which inverts the display colors and turns black text on white into red text on black.
- ck2 11y agoIt's called the power off button? Seriously, what is wrong with people, turn the thing off. Future "news": Food needs to stop being so tasty so people don't eat too much.
- maxerickson 11y agoYour joke is sort of true. Snack foods generally have an excessively high ratio of palatability/satiation. (I'd like to see it change because individuals make the choice, not by fiat, so let's not have an argument about it)
- Tenhundfeld 11y agoI and most of my acquaintances no longer have a traditional landline phone. My smartphone is the only way to contact me in an emergency. If friends or family need to reach me to extricate them from a bad situation or come to the hospital, etc., I want to be reachable. It's only happened a few times in my life, thankfully, but I don't like the idea of being completely unreachable until I wake up and turn my phone back on. That said, I could turn off wifi and cellular data, but that's one more thing to remember to do every night. I suppose if you find the temptation overwhelming, it could be worth it though. My point is just that turning off the phone is not as simple of a decision as you make it sound.
- ck2 11y agotouching "airplane mode" is too hard for you? it's a pull down, one click if you set it up right also, some phones with 5.1 or 6.0 can change modes automatically depending on time of day and can turn off mobile data and wifi - you can leave voice enabled for "emergencies"
- EdwardCoffin 11y agoAre you claiming that airplane mode will let people receive emergency calls? I am pretty sure that is not the case.
- 11y ago
- tdkl 11y agoOr people just need to put the phone down before going to sleep. Every non-infantile responsible adult is capable of that. How hard can it be ?
- mahouse 11y agoYou did not read the article... It's not about putting down the phone, it's about the light it emits.
- skrebbel 11y agoMaybe he did. The blue tones are no problem if you simply don't look at the damn thing all evening.
- walterbell 11y agoOr if you install software to control color temperature.
- skrebbel 11y agoSuper hard, and you know it. Plenty people's willpower is basically depleted by night time. My own little lifehack here is that my phone stays downstairs, in the charger, when I go to bed. I use an old phone without wifi or SIM to act as a simple, programmable, non-annoying alarm clock. It means that by the time I'm down, I don't need to resist to urge to just check HN one more time.
- tasqa 11y agoAs other said it is not necessarily about the using the phone it's about the light emitted from screens of all our devices. T he issue also applies to using other screens at night. Like watching TV right until you go to bed, or even in bed. I guess using your phone in bed to set an alarm and whatnot is a more common case and thus is used as the example.
- dexterdog 11y ago
- nicerobot 11y agoIsn't that the "do not disturb" settings in iOS?
- jqueryin 11y agoPrecisely this. I did find that it doesn't meet my needs exactly, however. I favorited a number of inbound numbers such as Pingdom and co-workers to allow for alerts to come through but it doesn't apply to SMS messaging. They simply get muted, even if the number is in your favorites. I had to turn off "Do Not Disturb" simply because overrides wouldn't be triggered by SMS messages. I believe it should apply to both SMS and phone for the overrides.
- bluehex 11y agoNo the article is talking about the blue light affecting hormone production. "Do not disturb" does nothing for that.
- upofadown 11y agoWhen reading about circadian light it helps to remember that the actual biological research is still a bit thin. There are a couple of studies out there that show that light of other wavelengths reduces the effect of the blue light on melatonin. Since the problem is normally caused by the bright white areas on the screen it is possible that all that is required is to turn down the overall brightness at night. Incidentally, this effect might explain why people complain that typical office lighting isn't bright enough to cause sufficient melatonin suppression during the day.
- walterbell 11y agoThis is the obvious change immediately made by anyone whose health is affected. If the lowest level of brightness were sufficient, users would not need to seek out apps like f.lux.
- RivieraKid 11y agoI don't understand why Google hasn't implemented this yet. It's easy to do that and has a huge value. I always had to root my phone just to do this.
- jzwinck 11y agoDictating what is "easy to do" is an insult to software producers everywhere. If you'd like to know more about how "simple" things can take lots of effort to deploy in heavily-used production software, consider reading Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog for a while.
- kmfrk 11y agoThe Do Not Disturb feature with defined DND times goes a long way on iOS. Definitely recommend it, and yes, receiving notifications at 2AM can be a total pain.
- pilif 11y agoMy brain must be wired up differently, but the best way for me to fall asleep is by watching youtube videos on my iPad. When I'm sufficiently tired, it's a matter of minutes before I'm asleep.
- dalke 11y agoI believe that discovery was made decades ago, given the stories I've come across of people who fell asleep to 'The Late Show' with Carson, back when that was the last broadcast of the day. Ahh, here are two links which mention those days: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/18/how_jimmy_fallon_and_the_roots_brought_hip_hop_to_late_night/ http://www.salon.com/2014/02/18/how_jimmy_fallon_and_the_roo... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2015/08/12/finally-nightly-johnny-carson-tonight-show-episodes-are-coming-to-tv-but-only-for-some-people/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w... .
- carterehsmith 11y agoFor those wearing glasses, you can opt for special coating that filters some of the blue light out. The one I got was ~$40 option when I last ordered new glasses, and was branded "digital protection glasses" and "Kodak BlueReflect".
- jacobolus 11y agoOrange safety glasses entirely block those wavelengths. This kind of thing: http://amzn.com/B003OBZ64M/ http://amzn.com/B003OBZ64M/ If looking through your glasses doesn’t make everything look significantly yellower/oranger than usual when you first put them on, then it’s not blocking too much blue light. You can try to find a spec sheet with the spectral transmission distribution to get a full idea.