
F.lux v4 - modinfo
https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/v4/bigupdate/?v=4.55
======
herf
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.

~~~
graeme
What’s the best way to get flux or a flux like experience on mobile: is it a
rooted android with the flux app?

Ios night shift isn’t nearly as good, and jailbreaking ios is much harder than
formerly.

~~~
y4mi
Isn't it natively supported at this point? I switched through several ROMs and
all had it. It's just not enabled by default.

~~~
graeme
I don’t know if it’s quite the same blue shift. It certainly isn’t on ios.

------
internet2000
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-o...](https://www.howtogeek.com/302186/how-to-enable-night-light-on-
windows-10/)

~~~
dingo_bat
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
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
> _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
>> 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.

------
zachruss92
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
I just sent them $15 through the donate link at the top of the post.

------
davidscolgan
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
If you want to get really _really_ crazy, you could stop using your computer
at night and try reading (paper) books before bed.

~~~
davidscolgan
So interestingly enough, wearing the orange goggles or using the rubylith on a
device that lights itself can get less blue light into your eyes than reading
a book with a lamp on next to you (or of course, wear the goggles with a lamp
on works too). Could be a further way to fall asleep faster. I've been
fascinated by this phenomenon for a while - the theory I've heard is that
humans evolved during a time when the sun was the only source of light besides
maybe fire, and so darkness or light the color of fire signaled the time for
being sleepy. When you get the blue colored light into your eyes at night the
brain gets confused and doesn't know what time it is.

~~~
sampl
Thanks for a genuine answer to my snarky reply :)

Re fire, another thing that’s helped me is using candlelight in the evening.
It keeps things darkish (and of course it’s a warm color of light).

~~~
davidscolgan
Haha, no problem! And yeah, candles would definitely then work. Some people
I've read suggest that if you can don't use any artificial lights at night
(obviously kind of difficult), and if you do you'll naturally start getting
tired at sunset. Then you get to wake up at 5am! Hard to have a social life
though.

------
blibble
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)

~~~
nasredin
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.

------
yoodenvranx
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
Interesting, I really can't stand using a system at night without it.

~~~
jumpkickhit
Same here. It's like staring into the sun when it's off.

------
kccqzy
> 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.

~~~
dingdingdang
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)

------
codingdave
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
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-...](https://lifehacker.com/259154/enable-night-vision-mode-with-
nocturne)

------
baby
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.

~~~
KingMob
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)

~~~
dingaling
Increasingly though daylight-frequency lightbulbs are becoming mainstream. Our
house has them fitted everywhere, as does a new development of 100+ homes
nearby.

I suppose that may affect sleep patterns in the short term but after several
years of using exclusively 6500K lighting I don't have any problem falling
asleep after turning-off the bedside lamp even though there's no graduated
transition from 'blue' light to darkness.

------
kennu
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.)

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

------
jivckack
Too bad it's proprietary spyware.

