11 ms·

This thing gets a lot of love by a bunch of folks here, so I gave it a good half year of trying. But it's just too annoying. Around 5pm, your display turns pi

This thing gets a lot of love by a bunch of folks here, so I gave it a good half year of trying. But it's just too annoying. Around 5pm, your display turns pinkish orange and it becomes a lot harder to see anything. Code gets harder to read, colors display wrong, video just fades to black. None of the advertised happiness ensues. The second half-year it remained installed, my only interaction with it was to notice it screw up my display, then right-click the tray icon and disable it. Needless to say, I didn't install it on the new box I bought this year. I don't understand why people like it.

bti 14y ago
Did you play around with the lighting setting? I have it set for halogen and set the transition to slow (1 hour) and I don't even notice it.
mipapage 14y ago
I've only just installed it, and found that I need to disable it if I'm doing any serious work. However if I have some free time at night to go over pinned tabs or read some articles I leave it on and find I do get sleepier much faster, to the detriment of my open-tab count.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  Is serious work == Photoshop or does it bother you when programming too? I only tolerate f.lux when programming, but it happens to be what I do every night :)
  - mipapage 14y ago
    I can program for 30 minutes with it, but I get tired :) so if I am troubleshooting a problem that is going to take a while or a client indicates it is urgent, f.lux goes off.
cstejerean 14y ago
I have my lighting at night set to "fluorescent" and use the slow transition. I don't generally notice it turning on, and I use the "disable for an hour" setting if I'm doing anything where I need more color accuracy.
fredsted 14y ago
Whenever Flux gets mentioned, there's two groups of people: 1: Doesn't understand it, hates the "wrong" colors. Can't get used to it. 2: Appreciates the candle-like colors, says it helps them sleep in the evening or relaxes their eyes. I wonder if there's some sort of genetic difference? Maybe some people just aren't sensitive to bright light in the evening?
- readme 14y ago
  I would take this a step further and say it happens when any project or software gets mentioned on HN. There are always two groups of people: Those who like it, and those who don't. Those who don't are usually composed of a lot of people who don't actually care, but just thrive on contradicting people. I'd say it's more of a personality phenomenon, but acknowledge the possibility you present as well.
  - tossacct 14y ago
    Theoretically, we might only recognize about half of those contradictors at any one time. If these theoretical contradictors are evenly distributed, spherical, and massless, then it seems natural that around 50% will be busy contradicting other contradictors, and writing well thought out and earnest posts about how great the software is. One can only hope that they all get sent out into a vacuum.
  - rsl7 14y ago
    And the majority of people aren't motivated enough either way to comment, so we listen to the vocal minority with extreme views. Like everywhere in life.
  - jmilloy 14y ago
    And those who do are often composed of people who just like to be excited by new things that seem cool. Or we could describe both populations in a more positive light.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    Part of the problem is the people who like it insist that everybody must like it and anybody who doesn't like it just doesn't get it. I don't get upset when people talk about things that made their lives better, I get upset when they make unqualified statements about my life.
manaskarekar 14y ago
I actually would get used to the new temperature, but working with Lightroom a lot, it became a hassle to have to constantly disable it. Also watching videos/flickring etc needed it to be disabled to get the right colors on screen.
skrause 14y ago
My main issue with f.lux (and the reason I don't use it) is that you can't configure it to wait until a certain time to start with the transition. When I go to bed at 11 pm, I would like f.lux to start its one hour transition at 9 pm so that I don't see that much cold light the last two hours before sleep. And in the morning it should start directly with the settings for the day, without any transition. Tying it to sunrise/sunset is what makes it useless. In winter it starts the transition at 4 pm while I'm still working. The amount of daylight I get in winter is already low enough, using f.lux would make the winter depression even worse. I could of course trick it by settings the location to place in the Southern hemisphere, but that won't help me during spring and fall...
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  I didn't set it to be in the Southern Hemisphere but just moved it further West. I never notice the transition from warm-to-cold anyway (not an early riser) and it delayed the cold-to-warm transition by 2 hours.
  - skrause 14y ago
    Unfortunately then I would have to disable f.lux every time in the morning because otherwise it wouldn't transition back until noon.
- mnicole 14y ago
  Similar issue here. I love it but it starts too early and clicking the "turn off for a hour" setting all the time was just a pain. I like that it initially tries to auto-tune itself, but I'd enjoy it even more if it had a customizable schedule. And this might defeat the purpose, but if I could configure it to know what Spaces it was in in OS X, I could still design and not have to turn it off manually for just that one Space with the browser window in it, where knowing the actual colors is important.
  - ars 14y ago
    Pick a location on the equator, and offset it to your preferred schedule instead of your actual sunrise/sunset time.
rplnt 14y ago
Well that's the thing, you need to adjust, not disable it. I found out that the slow transition over an hour is essential, otherwise it's too disturbing. It didn't work on linux for some reason though. I haven't had any trouble while coding with it, or see anything well enough. When you do some work where you need to see colors properly then it's not usable of course. But it's fine for late night reading.
- Semaphor 14y ago
  Yeah, when I saw this post I doublechecked if I even had it installed. Yep. Installed and active. But with the super slow transition I'd only really see it if I turned it off.
waxjar 14y ago
I used to have the same issue as you. F.lux emulates an undergoing sun. That doesn't happen in 20 seconds. Set the transition time to Slow. Also select the right type of lighting. If none of the types match your lighting, juggle a bit with the settings until your screen looks the same way a piece of paper would look in the same lighting. If you do that, you won't notice it's running at all. The only reason I turn it off is when I'm watching a movie. The colours in a movie usually already take darkness in account.
- jonnytran 14y ago
  I wish there were some way for it to detect the ambient light of the room I'm in. Late at night I prefer the warmest setting. But I feel like I'm constantly adjusting f.lux based on where I am. If I'm out, I can't control the lighting of the room. At home in the winter when it gets dark early, I don't want to turn the lights off at 5pm. But if I don't adjust f.lux, it hurts my eyes. For the most part, though, I think it's great.
  - mikepurvis 14y ago
    It would be neat if it could auto-calibrate based on a reference image of what you look like sitting in front of your webcam.
  - Avshalom 14y ago
    As long as it can be set by command line or has a simple config file it shouldn't be that hard to set up a daemon to take a picture with a webcam then munge the color temp and brightness and adjust f.lux accordingly.
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    My grandfather had an ancient color TV with this feature. You could press a toggle button on the front that would open or close an iris over a sensor, and the TV would adjust the on-screen color to match the room lighting.
knowaveragejoe 14y ago
....I feel you're having trouble configuring the app.
Shorel 14y ago
The right way to use it is to NOT use the default settings. For me is: days, all the way to the right (bluish) and nights, about one third to the left (just a little reddish). Also, make the transition last one hour (20 seconds is insane). Also, I think it looks great only on HDMI, and ugly on VGA.
baliex 14y ago
You say around 5pm the display turns orange, are you seeing an instant change? Try the slow option that changes the colour over a longer period so you don't even notice it happening.
pretoriusB 14y ago
>Around 5pm, your display turns pinkish orange and it becomes a lot harder to see anything. Code gets harder to read, colors display wrong, video just fades to black. None of the advertised happiness ensues. You know that you can tune the white balance to your preference in the program, right?
zacharystern 14y ago
If you just set it to fade in over an hour, instead of instantly, you wont even notice it. That's how I do it.
herf 14y ago
(author of f.lux here) Color adaptation actually takes about 2 minutes, and we transition by default in 20 seconds (some video cards use a ton of CPU during the transition time, so we pushed it a bit faster.) The slow transition option should help some people. Also a badly-calibrated monitor can give a very undesirable result color-wise, but a white page should look like your room lighting if we do things right.
- RivieraKid 14y ago
  Is the Android version still on your todo list? I was thinking about making something like f.lux for Android.
- e40 14y ago
  I wish there was something in between 20s and 60m. When I'm doing image editing, I don't want f.lux messing with colors, but I might not notice if I have it on 60m.... 2m would be better for me than 20s.
  - Shank 14y ago
    There's a button that completely disables it for color sensitive work. That's the best option.
    - e40 14y ago
      I only see "Disable for one hour."
- bgruber 14y ago
  > a white page should look like your room lighting if we do things right. as someone in the "those colors look weird" camp, this might convince me to give it a try. it implies that those i've seen using it have it set up wrong.
- egypturnash 14y ago
  I love f.lux, thank you. It's on my Mac and on my iPad. It'd be on my iPhone too if I could jailbreak the thing yet. Oh and here is a bug that's been niggling at me. If you have your laptop plugged into an external display after the evening light kicks in, then unplug the laptop, it's in screaming bright normal colors on its own screen until you quit and restart f.lux. Same if you plug in the external screen in the evening.
Metrop0218 14y ago
I highly recommend using the 1 hour transition time instead of the instant one. It feels much more natural as your screen essentially dims as the sun sets. I've found that it's quite pleasant on the eyes.
joevandyk 14y ago
Do you have flux set to slowly modify the white balance? If it changes over the course of an hour, then I find it's pretty difficult to notice the change. Videos shouldn't be black though. Flux does have different white balance targets, have you tried selecting a different one?
j45 14y ago
Part of it is having to change the color schemes you code in to pay nice with the tints applied to the screen. You can also change the color of the tint based on the type of lighting you have in your room (halogen, tungsten, fluorescent, etc) which makes a difference. Still, it just might not be for you :)
znowi 14y ago
Yes, same here. Default 3400K is very uncomfortable on my eyes. 4300K fluorescent is bearable, but still annoying. I much prefer to change brightness if I need to ambiently adjust the screen.
akaru 14y ago
I wrote a similar app called Brightness that lets you manually control display tint and brightness, instead of relying on a timed mechanism. Myself, and many other designers and developers, find it very useful. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brightness-dimmer-tint-control/id424164948?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brightness-dimmer-tint-contr...
blhack 14y ago
I think it's because of the transition happening too quickly. If the transition took an hour, it would be great :). edit: You CAN make it take an hour! Just installed again!
krobertson 14y ago
I love f.lux, I just wish it was adjustable for that exact reason. It is winter, it gets dark out early... I don't want it to shift to night time mode at 5pm. I find myself hitting "disable for an hour" 1-2 times a day before I leave work. However, when I get home and get back on my system, then I'm ready for night time mode. I prefer the 20 second switch over so I know to turn it off fast. With the long transition, I find myself being annoyed for a while until its enough for realize I need to turn it off. I'd love a simple "activate at sunset, but not before X:XX".
- abrowne 14y ago
  Maybe set it it for a time zone a couple hours behind your location?
onethree 14y ago
for some reason it would continuously flick between on and off, even when i had it disabled, so i just gave up on it too

bti 14y ago

Did you play around with the lighting setting? I have it set for halogen and set the transition to slow (1 hour) and I don't even notice it.

mipapage 14y ago

I've only just installed it, and found that I need to disable it if I'm doing any serious work. However if I have some free time at night to go over pinned tabs or read some articles I leave it on and find I do get sleepier much faster, to the detriment of my open-tab count.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
Is serious work == Photoshop or does it bother you when programming too? I only tolerate f.lux when programming, but it happens to be what I do every night :)
- mipapage 14y ago
  I can program for 30 minutes with it, but I get tired :) so if I am troubleshooting a problem that is going to take a while or a client indicates it is urgent, f.lux goes off.

cstejerean 14y ago

I have my lighting at night set to "fluorescent" and use the slow transition. I don't generally notice it turning on, and I use the "disable for an hour" setting if I'm doing anything where I need more color accuracy.

fredsted 14y ago

Whenever Flux gets mentioned, there's two groups of people: 1: Doesn't understand it, hates the "wrong" colors. Can't get used to it. 2: Appreciates the candle-like colors, says it helps them sleep in the evening or relaxes their eyes. I wonder if there's some sort of genetic difference? Maybe some people just aren't sensitive to bright light in the evening?

readme 14y ago
I would take this a step further and say it happens when any project or software gets mentioned on HN. There are always two groups of people: Those who like it, and those who don't. Those who don't are usually composed of a lot of people who don't actually care, but just thrive on contradicting people. I'd say it's more of a personality phenomenon, but acknowledge the possibility you present as well.
- tossacct 14y ago
  Theoretically, we might only recognize about half of those contradictors at any one time. If these theoretical contradictors are evenly distributed, spherical, and massless, then it seems natural that around 50% will be busy contradicting other contradictors, and writing well thought out and earnest posts about how great the software is. One can only hope that they all get sent out into a vacuum.
- rsl7 14y ago
  And the majority of people aren't motivated enough either way to comment, so we listen to the vocal minority with extreme views. Like everywhere in life.
- jmilloy 14y ago
  And those who do are often composed of people who just like to be excited by new things that seem cool. Or we could describe both populations in a more positive light.
- tedunangst 14y ago
  Part of the problem is the people who like it insist that everybody must like it and anybody who doesn't like it just doesn't get it. I don't get upset when people talk about things that made their lives better, I get upset when they make unqualified statements about my life.

manaskarekar 14y ago

I actually would get used to the new temperature, but working with Lightroom a lot, it became a hassle to have to constantly disable it. Also watching videos/flickring etc needed it to be disabled to get the right colors on screen.

skrause 14y ago

My main issue with f.lux (and the reason I don't use it) is that you can't configure it to wait until a certain time to start with the transition. When I go to bed at 11 pm, I would like f.lux to start its one hour transition at 9 pm so that I don't see that much cold light the last two hours before sleep. And in the morning it should start directly with the settings for the day, without any transition. Tying it to sunrise/sunset is what makes it useless. In winter it starts the transition at 4 pm while I'm still working. The amount of daylight I get in winter is already low enough, using f.lux would make the winter depression even worse. I could of course trick it by settings the location to place in the Southern hemisphere, but that won't help me during spring and fall...

gurkendoktor 14y ago
I didn't set it to be in the Southern Hemisphere but just moved it further West. I never notice the transition from warm-to-cold anyway (not an early riser) and it delayed the cold-to-warm transition by 2 hours.
- skrause 14y ago
  Unfortunately then I would have to disable f.lux every time in the morning because otherwise it wouldn't transition back until noon.
mnicole 14y ago
Similar issue here. I love it but it starts too early and clicking the "turn off for a hour" setting all the time was just a pain. I like that it initially tries to auto-tune itself, but I'd enjoy it even more if it had a customizable schedule. And this might defeat the purpose, but if I could configure it to know what Spaces it was in in OS X, I could still design and not have to turn it off manually for just that one Space with the browser window in it, where knowing the actual colors is important.
- ars 14y ago
  Pick a location on the equator, and offset it to your preferred schedule instead of your actual sunrise/sunset time.

rplnt 14y ago

Well that's the thing, you need to adjust, not disable it. I found out that the slow transition over an hour is essential, otherwise it's too disturbing. It didn't work on linux for some reason though. I haven't had any trouble while coding with it, or see anything well enough. When you do some work where you need to see colors properly then it's not usable of course. But it's fine for late night reading.

Semaphor 14y ago
Yeah, when I saw this post I doublechecked if I even had it installed. Yep. Installed and active. But with the super slow transition I'd only really see it if I turned it off.

waxjar 14y ago

I used to have the same issue as you. F.lux emulates an undergoing sun. That doesn't happen in 20 seconds. Set the transition time to Slow. Also select the right type of lighting. If none of the types match your lighting, juggle a bit with the settings until your screen looks the same way a piece of paper would look in the same lighting. If you do that, you won't notice it's running at all. The only reason I turn it off is when I'm watching a movie. The colours in a movie usually already take darkness in account.

jonnytran 14y ago
I wish there were some way for it to detect the ambient light of the room I'm in. Late at night I prefer the warmest setting. But I feel like I'm constantly adjusting f.lux based on where I am. If I'm out, I can't control the lighting of the room. At home in the winter when it gets dark early, I don't want to turn the lights off at 5pm. But if I don't adjust f.lux, it hurts my eyes. For the most part, though, I think it's great.
- mikepurvis 14y ago
  It would be neat if it could auto-calibrate based on a reference image of what you look like sitting in front of your webcam.
- Avshalom 14y ago
  As long as it can be set by command line or has a simple config file it shouldn't be that hard to set up a daemon to take a picture with a webcam then munge the color temp and brightness and adjust f.lux accordingly.
- nitrogen 14y ago
  My grandfather had an ancient color TV with this feature. You could press a toggle button on the front that would open or close an iris over a sensor, and the TV would adjust the on-screen color to match the room lighting.

knowaveragejoe 14y ago

....I feel you're having trouble configuring the app.

Shorel 14y ago

The right way to use it is to NOT use the default settings. For me is: days, all the way to the right (bluish) and nights, about one third to the left (just a little reddish). Also, make the transition last one hour (20 seconds is insane). Also, I think it looks great only on HDMI, and ugly on VGA.

baliex 14y ago

You say around 5pm the display turns orange, are you seeing an instant change? Try the slow option that changes the colour over a longer period so you don't even notice it happening.

pretoriusB 14y ago

>Around 5pm, your display turns pinkish orange and it becomes a lot harder to see anything. Code gets harder to read, colors display wrong, video just fades to black. None of the advertised happiness ensues. You know that you can tune the white balance to your preference in the program, right?

zacharystern 14y ago

If you just set it to fade in over an hour, instead of instantly, you wont even notice it. That's how I do it.

herf 14y ago

(author of f.lux here) Color adaptation actually takes about 2 minutes, and we transition by default in 20 seconds (some video cards use a ton of CPU during the transition time, so we pushed it a bit faster.) The slow transition option should help some people. Also a badly-calibrated monitor can give a very undesirable result color-wise, but a white page should look like your room lighting if we do things right.

RivieraKid 14y ago
Is the Android version still on your todo list? I was thinking about making something like f.lux for Android.
e40 14y ago
I wish there was something in between 20s and 60m. When I'm doing image editing, I don't want f.lux messing with colors, but I might not notice if I have it on 60m.... 2m would be better for me than 20s.
- Shank 14y ago
  There's a button that completely disables it for color sensitive work. That's the best option.
  - e40 14y ago
    I only see "Disable for one hour."
bgruber 14y ago
> a white page should look like your room lighting if we do things right. as someone in the "those colors look weird" camp, this might convince me to give it a try. it implies that those i've seen using it have it set up wrong.
egypturnash 14y ago
I love f.lux, thank you. It's on my Mac and on my iPad. It'd be on my iPhone too if I could jailbreak the thing yet. Oh and here is a bug that's been niggling at me. If you have your laptop plugged into an external display after the evening light kicks in, then unplug the laptop, it's in screaming bright normal colors on its own screen until you quit and restart f.lux. Same if you plug in the external screen in the evening.

Metrop0218 14y ago

I highly recommend using the 1 hour transition time instead of the instant one. It feels much more natural as your screen essentially dims as the sun sets. I've found that it's quite pleasant on the eyes.

joevandyk 14y ago

Do you have flux set to slowly modify the white balance? If it changes over the course of an hour, then I find it's pretty difficult to notice the change. Videos shouldn't be black though. Flux does have different white balance targets, have you tried selecting a different one?

j45 14y ago

Part of it is having to change the color schemes you code in to pay nice with the tints applied to the screen. You can also change the color of the tint based on the type of lighting you have in your room (halogen, tungsten, fluorescent, etc) which makes a difference. Still, it just might not be for you :)

znowi 14y ago

Yes, same here. Default 3400K is very uncomfortable on my eyes. 4300K fluorescent is bearable, but still annoying. I much prefer to change brightness if I need to ambiently adjust the screen.

akaru 14y ago

I wrote a similar app called Brightness that lets you manually control display tint and brightness, instead of relying on a timed mechanism. Myself, and many other designers and developers, find it very useful. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brightness-dimmer-tint-control/id424164948?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brightness-dimmer-tint-contr...

blhack 14y ago

I think it's because of the transition happening too quickly. If the transition took an hour, it would be great :). edit: You CAN make it take an hour! Just installed again!

krobertson 14y ago

I love f.lux, I just wish it was adjustable for that exact reason. It is winter, it gets dark out early... I don't want it to shift to night time mode at 5pm. I find myself hitting "disable for an hour" 1-2 times a day before I leave work. However, when I get home and get back on my system, then I'm ready for night time mode. I prefer the 20 second switch over so I know to turn it off fast. With the long transition, I find myself being annoyed for a while until its enough for realize I need to turn it off. I'd love a simple "activate at sunset, but not before X:XX".

abrowne 14y ago
Maybe set it it for a time zone a couple hours behind your location?

onethree 14y ago

for some reason it would continuously flick between on and off, even when i had it disabled, so i just gave up on it too