10 ms·

F.lux v4

155 points by modinfo 9y ago

kccqzy 9y ago
> 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.
- joncrocks 9y ago
  Nope, you can still adjust three sliders independently for daytime, sunset and bedtime.
- dingdingdang 9y ago
  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 https://justgetflux.com/dlwin.html
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
blibble 9y ago
just a reminder that redshift exists: https://github.com/jonls/redshift/ https://github.com/jonls/redshift/ no phone home/automatic updates (plus it's open source)
- gka_ 9y ago
  how does F.lux phone home? what does it send?
- nasredin 9y ago
  For Windows there's also: 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.
- chungy 9y ago
  GNOME 3.24 and newer have a built-in Night Mode too.
yoodenvranx 9y ago
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.
- Retr0spectrum 9y ago
  Interesting, I really can't stand using a system at night without it.
  - jumpkickhit 9y ago
    Same here. It's like staring into the sun when it's off.
- nightmunnas 9y ago
  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.
davidscolgan 9y ago
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.
- sampl 9y ago
  If you want to get really really crazy, you could stop using your computer at night and try reading (paper) books before bed.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Paper books don't have a built-in dictionary that pops up when I long-press my finger on a word :(.
    - jackcarter 9y ago
      My ebook reader does something like this.
      - julien_c 9y ago
        irony == lost
      - andai 9y ago
internet2000 9y ago
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. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207513 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207513 https://www.howtogeek.com/302186/how-to-enable-night-light-on-windows-10/ https://www.howtogeek.com/302186/how-to-enable-night-light-o...
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  And both of them work better than flux and have more customization options. There's literally no reason for flux to exist anymore. Edit: also android and ios
  - Elidrake42 9y ago
    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.
    - Razengan 9y ago
      > Nightshift won't get nearly as warm as I prefer it 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.)
      - hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
        >> Nightshift won't get nearly as warm as I prefer it > Configurable in System Preferences -> Displays. The whole problem is that it isn't configurable to get as warm as many people (myself included) prefer.
  - shawnz 9y ago
zachruss92 9y ago
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.
- dcre 9y ago
  I just sent them $15 through the donate link at the top of the post.
baby 9y ago
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.
- icebraining 9y ago
  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.
  - Elvewyn 9y ago
    I used to get incredible headaches when sitting in front of my monitor at night. When I found f.lux, those went away immediately.
- reificator 9y ago
  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.
- KingMob 9y ago
  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. Here's a publicly-accessible review paper if you wish to learn more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254760/#BX1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254760/#BX1
creativityland 9y ago
What an incredible milestone. Really glad to see the team still updating this after so many years.
herf 9y ago
Hi everyone--developer of f.lux here. 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/ 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.
- Bromskloss 9y ago
  > I wanted to say that we stopped thinking of f.lux as a way to match a room about 8 years ago. That's funny. All I want is having nice, soft colours when I'm up all night.
  - 9y ago
codingdave 9y ago
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.
Arubis 9y ago
I am a happy, satisfied, long-term f.lux user. And I doubt that will change in the near future. 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-nocturne https://lifehacker.com/259154/enable-night-vision-mode-with-...
kennu 9y ago
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.)
jivckack 9y ago
Too bad it's proprietary spyware.

155 points by modinfo 9y ago

> 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.

joncrocks 9y ago
Nope, you can still adjust three sliders independently for daytime, sunset and bedtime.
dingdingdang 9y ago
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 https://justgetflux.com/dlwin.html
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

blibble 9y ago

just a reminder that redshift exists: https://github.com/jonls/redshift/ https://github.com/jonls/redshift/ no phone home/automatic updates (plus it's open source)

gka_ 9y ago
how does F.lux phone home? what does it send?
nasredin 9y ago
For Windows there's also: 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.
chungy 9y ago
GNOME 3.24 and newer have a built-in Night Mode too.

yoodenvranx 9y ago

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.

Retr0spectrum 9y ago
Interesting, I really can't stand using a system at night without it.
- jumpkickhit 9y ago
  Same here. It's like staring into the sun when it's off.
nightmunnas 9y ago
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.

davidscolgan 9y ago

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.

sampl 9y ago
If you want to get really really crazy, you could stop using your computer at night and try reading (paper) books before bed.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Paper books don't have a built-in dictionary that pops up when I long-press my finger on a word :(.
  - jackcarter 9y ago
    My ebook reader does something like this.
    - julien_c 9y ago
      irony == lost
    - andai 9y ago

internet2000 9y ago

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. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207513 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207513 https://www.howtogeek.com/302186/how-to-enable-night-light-on-windows-10/ https://www.howtogeek.com/302186/how-to-enable-night-light-o...

dingo_bat 9y ago
And both of them work better than flux and have more customization options. There's literally no reason for flux to exist anymore. Edit: also android and ios
- Elidrake42 9y ago
  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.
  - Razengan 9y ago
    > Nightshift won't get nearly as warm as I prefer it 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.)
    - hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
      >> Nightshift won't get nearly as warm as I prefer it > Configurable in System Preferences -> Displays. The whole problem is that it isn't configurable to get as warm as many people (myself included) prefer.
- shawnz 9y ago

zachruss92 9y ago

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.

dcre 9y ago
I just sent them $15 through the donate link at the top of the post.

baby 9y ago

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.

icebraining 9y ago
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.
- Elvewyn 9y ago
  I used to get incredible headaches when sitting in front of my monitor at night. When I found f.lux, those went away immediately.
reificator 9y ago
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.
KingMob 9y ago
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. Here's a publicly-accessible review paper if you wish to learn more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254760/#BX1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254760/#BX1

creativityland 9y ago

What an incredible milestone. Really glad to see the team still updating this after so many years.

herf 9y ago

Hi everyone--developer of f.lux here. 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/ 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.

Bromskloss 9y ago
> I wanted to say that we stopped thinking of f.lux as a way to match a room about 8 years ago. That's funny. All I want is having nice, soft colours when I'm up all night.
- 9y ago

codingdave 9y ago

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.

Arubis 9y ago

I am a happy, satisfied, long-term f.lux user. And I doubt that will change in the near future. 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-nocturne https://lifehacker.com/259154/enable-night-vision-mode-with-...

kennu 9y ago

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.)

jivckack 9y ago

Too bad it's proprietary spyware.