
The Story Behind F.lux - felixbraun
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/the-story-behind-flux-the-night-owls-color-shifting-sleep-app-of-choice
======
laretluval
I am one of the people who love the idea of f.lux. I use it and it makes my
eyes feel a lot better and makes me feel sleepy at the right times.

But the app itself is terribly broken, at least on El Capitan. Whenever I
switch modes, the screen flashes the original blue colors---my impression is
that even a few seconds of blue light can mess up melatonin production, so
this is unacceptable, especially from an app that is pushing the idea of color
temperature mattering. Also, "movie mode" results in pulses of blue light
every few seconds. Sometimes I select "disable for an hour" and nothing is
disabled. "Disable for current app" is also spotty.

For this concept to work, and if the ideas about the effects of color
temperature are true, then the implementation has to be completely solid. So
I'm glad that Apple is duplicating the functionality of f.lux rather than
supporting f.lux itself on iOS. I've also been looking into alternatives on
OSX.

It's time that we move on to an implementation that actually works.

~~~
zyxley
The issues you're talking about aren't ones I've seen anyone else complain
about (and don't happen for me), so I'm wondering if there's something
specific to your configuration that's affecting it.

~~~
xtian
Actually I believe these problems are fairly common. I've seen them mentioned
before and I experience them myself. I think it has to do with integrated vs
discrete graphics in Mac laptops.

Disabling transparency in the accessibility options used to fix it, but it
doesn't anymore.

I'm very much hoping that Apple will include this functionality in the next
major release of OS X as f.lux has historically had trouble keeping up with OS
and hardware updates.

------
verusfossa
I use redshift[0] on my linux machines which I really like. Cyanogenmod has
LiveDisplay natively which is practically the same thing unfortunately it
works off off gps location and not manually editable lang/long. Both are
really helpful.

[0] [http://jonls.dk/redshift/](http://jonls.dk/redshift/)

~~~
rpgmaker
On Linux I use the 'Negative' Compiz plugin. You can apply it on a window by
window basis or desktop-wide. For both modes there are keyboard shortcuts
(that's what makes it such a killer feature IMO). People find the screen weird
when I enable the plugin but I'm a practical guy and this has saved my
eyesight.

I know you can invert colors in OSX but the effect is desktop-wide and you
can't use a hotkey to enable or disable it. Does something similar exist for
other OSes?

~~~
brianclements
I've been using this method for years. Very simple, and gets the job done.
Most websites and desktop apps default to whites and off-whites which convert
perfectly to blacks and off-blacks when enabled. Pocket, Firefox, and FBReader
on my Android devices all have dark modes for reading on my mobile devices;
takes care of all my use-cases!

~~~
rpgmaker
That's my case too! On Windows I have to use other kind of workarounds. Dark
styles on VS, stylization addons on Firefox, etc...

------
forgotpwtomain
Is anyone else puzzled by the idea of f.lux consuming 14 developer years (at
least according to the article), it's an awesome app but that seems like a
huge number for what it is: a gui interface to a very simple function*.

[0] [http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/sct-set-color-
temperatur...](http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/sct-set-color-temperature)

~~~
joshu
there is a whole bunch of stuff built but unreleased outside of the app.

~~~
kobayashi
What kind of stuff?

~~~
joshu
It is complicated. I only know because I am a friend, so we have to wait till
he releases stuff.

~~~
edwintorok
Will it be released as open-source? Doesn't really make sense to develop it as
a closed-source application, when the application itself is offered for free,
and open source versions exist already.

~~~
joshu
this is a very small understanding of what they are trying to build.

~~~
kobayashi
That's a rather ambiguously worded sentence.

Who lacks understanding of what they're trying to do? I know I do, and that's
because they're apparently not making mention of it.

------
slavik81
There's 29 comments here and every single one is neutral or positive about
Flux as an idea.

Am I the only one who used it, and hated the fact that my colours were
obviously all wrong?

Each time I used my computer at night, I noticed that everything was tinted
red, and it had no obvious effect on my sleep.

~~~
Terribledactyl
I have 2 issues with flux, one personal one science related.

personal) I'm colorblind and it really messed with my ability to guess at the
appropriate colors, and sometimes made it impossible to read text on the
screen. (Red on black is hard for me)

science) One of their more prominent articles showcases a study of how reading
on a stock iPad can mess up your sleep a lot, but reading a book with standard
bulb (much warmer than the iPad backlight) has a much smaller effect. I
remember studying the effect of light in neuroscience classes in college, and
blue light is potent, but so is total light received. Indirect light from
bulb, or having a device blast light directly into your retina. Never stood a
chance. Just shifting the colors can only reduce so much light. For example,
max out the brightness on any non oled based screen with a completely black
image. You still see light even though those gates have done the best they
can. My general impression of the reporting is "lets throw a bunch of science
at you, which doesn't quite say what we do, and hope you jump to our
conclusions."

~~~
tacos
That reporting starts from the research links on the F.lux site which 1) don't
really say what they they seem to think they say and 2) often conveniently
hide behind paywalls. The F.lux team genuinely seems to care about human
health yet they haven't bothered to write the equivalent of a three page term
paper about what they're basing their work on the past 8 years. It's odd.

Even in this thread (as in the other six or seven F.lux threads that have
popped up on HN lately) smart people are saying things that simply don't make
sense. We're basically dealing with the equivalent of blue-blocker sunglasses
from the 80s and it's odd seeing HN commenters spout the same informercial-
grade rhetoric I laugh at on late night television.

~~~
dota_fanatic
Some people, perhaps against their better judgement, like to use screens even
as they're getting closer and closer to sleep. Some even use screens in bed.
The difference in harshness of a 5800K screen and a 2700K screen is quite easy
to feel in an otherwise dark room, late in ones "day", and once you're used to
the latter, it is very uncomfortable to look directly at the former. One of
them feels better on your eyes than the other. It's that simple! How exactly
does this not make sense?

Enjoy your eye strain...? :-/ I find your laughing at our mutual experience
and desire to share it with others, so that they may too use screens with less
discomfort, odd. And unlike an infomercial, we're not trying to sell anything.

~~~
tacos
To clarify, I was speaking to broader claims of people saying f.lux puts them
to sleep like a baby and the f.lux authors themselves claiming it as a tool in
the fight against cancer and acne.

Note that f.lux does not even claim to prevent eyestrain. The closest they
come is this: "Our users say that f.lux prevents eyestrain." That's hardly
science; in fact it's exactly how shady companies market vitamins.

Also, I don't know what "feels better on your eyes" means but I will point out
that if 2700K screens felt better "in an otherwise dark room" then movie
theaters would use them. You say "It's that simple!" but like most things,
it's a little more complicated than that.

~~~
kungtotte
You see no difference between sitting 0.5 meters away from a screen that's
projecting its own light or sitting 15 meters away from a screen that has
light projected onto it?

~~~
simoncion
A photon is a photon, regardless of whether it's emitted directly or
reflected. All that matters is vibration frequency and intensity of the stream
of photons.

Do you disagree?

~~~
samizdatum
Maybe kungtotte is talking about accommodation or vergence, though I don't see
how these are relevant to f.lux or colour temperature.

------
ssijak
I am puzzled by so much fuss about one simple and small app (I am not
questioning its usefulness, I am using it too). Every once in awhile (and
frequently lately) it pops up on hacker news front page or somewhere on the
web.

~~~
xcasex
basically its the old Microsoft adage that Apple somehow co-opted, embrace -
extend etc etc. Apple implemented a feature for the next release of osx that
does what f.lux does, knowingly.

~~~
JeremyBanks
That's not what that expression meant:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)

~~~
kedean
Ehhhh, it's a grey area. They are definitely in the 'embrace' stage, but
they're doing it on iOS, where f.lux doesn't really have a presence. You can
argue that makes it different, or you could argue it's close enough.

------
_Marak_
Since I installed F.lux on my work computer I've experienced a significant
decrease in eye fatigue and a general increase in productivity while working
at night.

Would recommend for anyone who works in low-light conditions.

~~~
CuriousSkeptic
Interesting. I generally start to get really sleepy as soon as the red
shifting kicks in. I like it, really need to sleep more, but I wouldn't say
it's the recipe for increased productivity.

~~~
dageshi
If you suffer from any kind of eyestrain, it's a godsend. I have it set
permanently to my night temperature here in the UK at the moment due to the
short days and overcast weather.

------
irremediable
I use it, and I like it, and I think it works. But I also think they should
_really_ try to publish a paper on it, proving it works to improve e.g.
people's sleep quality.

~~~
gwern
It's free and not obviously harmful and has a plausible biological rationale,
but if you think it may not work, it's easy to run your own self-experiment:
stick it in a little randomized script and record when you go to bed for, say,
50 days and see. That's what I did with Redshift:
[http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#redshiftf.lux](http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#redshiftf.lux)

~~~
scott_s
Unfortunately, that self-experiment has the problem of the subject (yourself)
knowing which "treatment" you're getting. I'm not sure how to double-blind
something like this, though. It may require a study where we record subjects'
sleep patters, make them use a screen at night, but don't tell them that it's
the screen colors that are under experiment.

~~~
gwern
Empirically, I didn't notice and that almost screwed up the experiment; see
the part where a driver change broke Redshift and I didn't notice for a month.

(As well, I would note that you may be overestimating placebo or expectancy
effects here. In the meta-analyses I've seen, randomization is much more
important than placebo controls.)

~~~
scott_s
Interesting - if I understand correctly, you're saying that you didn't notice
for a month that _no_ color balance was happening. Then perhaps an even
simpler experiment preliminary experiment could be done to just see how well
subjects are able to guess if a screen has been color balanced at night. If
most people can't tell most of the time, then that simplifies doing an
efficacy experiment.

~~~
gwern
Not quite. The reddening is blatant, so if someone had asked me on any
particular day if Redshift was on or not, I could always correctly answer. But
it was randomized on a daily basis, so it is possible, even probable, for
occasional long sequences like 100001 to happen where the shifting was on or
off for multiple days in a row. What I'm saying is that I turned out to be
paying so little attention to whether the shifting was on or off, certain that
if it was off on a particular day that just meant the experiment was going as
planned, that I didn't notice even 20+ days of a single setting.

------
jgrahamc
I've used it for a long time and it makes the difference between feeling
sleepy in front of a computer and falling asleep in front of a computer.
Highly recommend it.

------
viraptor
Now it would be great if android included it in the system soon. I used an app
for it, but as soon as 6 came out, I dropped all unnecessary privileges from
installed apps.

Unfortunately you can't have any app drawing directly on the screen if you
want to change privileges. That means I had to choose between silly-bright
screen or more secure system... and that's a terrible tradeoff to present to
users.

~~~
chungy
CyanogenMod has it built-in, called LiveDisplay (and even a default tile in
quick settings for toggling it).

~~~
viraptor
CM has its own issues though. For example nexus 5 gets monthly security
patches from upstream right now, but CM-13 for the same model was last updated
in September 2015 :/

------
dharma1
I've been using it for a few years. It works.

Sometimes, if using a laptop in bed, I wish it would be possible to make the
LED backlight dimmer than the minimum setting, or apply a black semi
transparent overlay to dim things, from within f.lux. At the moment I have to
use another 3rd party app for that

------
racecar789
Fyi Display Link devices (which are used to dock a laptop to two monitors via
a single usb cable) do not support color calibration, so flux does not work.

Found out after purchasing a usb docking station. Still fairly happy with the
purchase though. Display Link is actively releasing new drivers so there is
hope.

------
mrbill
I was working a REALLY long shift at work about a year ago (datacenter move).
Came back to my desk from the DC at about 3am and for a few minutes, thought
my system or monitor was broken because everything was dark dark shades of
orange.

Then I finally realized I'd never been up at that time with f.lux running...
D'oh.

