I'm so insanely happy to see this, even with it's minor shortcomings.
f.lux has eliminated all eye-stress for me while computering -- it's been one of the only reasons I've considered jailbreaking my iPhone...until now! Serious thanks to the developers.
Completely agree! I started limiting myself to apps that had night mode such as, Alien Blue and Tweetbot.
Being able to go from a computer with f.lux to my iPhone with f.lux will play much nicer with my eyes at night. I can literally feel the strain in my eyes when going from f.lux to no f.lux.
We can only hope that control of blue light emissions will be natively implemented by all phone and tablet manufacturers, to protect the future health of billions of humans. Here are some articles about the impact of blue light on eyes and sleep.
http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2014/04/23/7-things-can-righ..., "Blue light is able to pass through what is called the retinohypothalamic tract, or pathway. This pathway is responsible for regulating our circadian rhythm and a number of other biological and behavioral processes."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/, "Hastings and Sweeney’s paper, published in the December 1958 Biological Bulletin, gathered dust for decades. No one thought these findings might hold any relevance for humans, whose circadian rhythms were then widely believed to be relatively insensitive to light. But scientific discoveries in the past two decades have changed all that."
https://theconversation.com/a-dark-night-is-good-for-your-he..., "In the last decade or two it has become clear that the genes which control the endogenous circadian rhythm (the “clock genes”) also control a large part of our entire genome including genes for metabolism (how we process the food we eat), DNA damage response (how we are protected from toxic chemicals and radiation), and cell cycle regulation and hormone production (how our cells and tissues grow)."
There is room lighting with low-blue content, e.g. the G.E. Align PM bulb, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PLR3M0M & https://gigaom.com/2014/09/01/what-is-the-blue-light-from-ou..., "It remains unclear whether our screens themselves will soon emit less blue light — Hansler is pessimistic because he says that changing the amount of blue light will be like admitting that the screens are causing health problems, and lawsuits could ensue."
> Hansler is pessimistic because he says that changing the amount of blue light will be like admitting that the screens are causing health problems, and lawsuits could ensue.
You don't need to talk of it as a health problem. Just say it makes it kinder on the eyes.
I'm surprised we haven't seen this emergent behavior for iOS yet. As more and more people have Xcode and a dev license, we could have a sufficiently large amount of people to skip the app store for apps that will never be allowed. I wonder how Apple will like that.
Seems like there's a reasonably good chance that we'll see a tool to automate this process—an "installer for apps".
I guess Apple would likely respond by one or both of (a) putting up more roadblocks to getting developer accounts or (b) further restricting what apps can do at a technical level through more sophisticated sandboxes, making the delta in allowed functionality between an app in the App Store and a sideloaded app smaller and smaller.
They must have expected this when they changed the latest xcode to allow free personal provisioning.
There's already some significant annoying limitations, in particular short provisioning expiration limits (must reinstall the app every 90 days), and no access to services like push notifications.
Yes, once a provisioning profile expires, apps built against it fail to launch.
You have to rebuild and reinstall the app (with an updated provisioning profile, but Xcode takes care of all that behind the scenes now) to get an expired app working again.
In addition, people underestimate what you can do from the sandbox (and will be able to do for a long time, unless Apple speeds up its development cycle): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10415288
The only issue with it is that the decision to give everyone a developer certificate for free was to increase Swift adoption. The security implications were not investigated. Apple wasn't aware that they put the final piece of the puzzle in place for something like this to exist.
> I'm surprised we haven't seen this emergent behavior for iOS yet. As more and more people have Xcode and a dev license, we could have a sufficiently large amount of people to skip the app store for apps that will never be allowed.
If this ever happened and got popular, you can be certain that Apple would shoot it down in an upcoming iOS release.
Because that's how Apple works: No freedom permitted on "their" devices.
Version 7 and we're just now getting the ability to sideload without a developer license? I think that actually demonstrates the PP's point. This isn't a new liberty, this is a tool to help Apple to drive adoption of their new language.
Their point was that the ability is going to be removed if it gets used at all. That just doesn't make any sense given the fact I outlined in my response.
Installed this earlier today, only thing thats worrying me so far is that it seems to wake up my phone (to the point it asks for the passcode) every now and then. Not really a fan of that happening all the time as I can see it draining the battery pretty quick. From what I remember reading through the GammaThingy source code it has something to do with needing to wake up the display to change the gamma (https://github.com/thomasfinch/GammaThingy/blob/2b504461c4f1...) but it seems to be doing quite a lot more even once the max temperature has been reached...
Edit: also probably worth mentioning, unlike GammaThingy the implementation of f.lux is hidden inside of a compiled nib.
This build of f.lux prefers to use notifications (you can turn off the Notification Center ones).
The screen settings we're changing only work when the screen is on but we have to be "ready" when you unlock your phone. We're working on a version that does quite a lot fewer wakeups.
In our jailbreak version, we just hook the screen unlock and do work then, but we can't do this in the jail because we never wake up.
In this version the notifications serve as a "wakeup". If we fail to show a notification, we hit the unlock instead.
That's awesome. Having used f.lux on all computers, I wish it would just somehow get into iOS (without needing a jailbreak).
On a serious note, have you people talked to Apple directly to get this added either into iOS (possibly the best approach considering how the app store and app policies are structured)?
Also, how did you get this to work on iOS even with side loading (and no jailbreak)? It would be interesting to know.
This _so_ clearly needs to be implemented in the OS or sufficient APIs need to be allowed for 3rd parties to implement it (à la content blocking concessions Apple made available). Thank you f.lux team! I can check the time at night without fully waking up!
Apple has contacted us to say that the f.lux for iOS download (previously available on this page) is in violation of the Developer Program Agreement, so this method of install is no longer available.
Too bad, I missed out on it. I would have loved to install it on my iOS devices, but the download is no longer available.
For those people who don't have the ability to sideload via Xcode (e.g., your parents or non techie friends), you can teach them the iOS Low Light Filter:
What are you objecting to specifically? I would think that, if your brain responds to light of a particular color or intensity, it's not going to care that the light source is an LCD.
I am going to need more than "I would think that" if I'm going to believe this, and considering how backlight leakage allows extra white light to emit from your screen, I'd consider that an important enough extra variable that needs to be accounted for before we just start equating "pure" blue lights to the complex lightwaves that come out of an LCD monitor.
Besides, the framing of your question is wrong. I don't even need to come up with a specific reason, the burden of proof lies on the makers of F.lux to demonstrate that their specific product does what it says, and simply citing inequivalent studies isn't enough.
>I don't even need to come up with a specific reason, the burden of proof lies on the makers of F.lux to demonstrate that their specific product does what it says
Man who the fuck cares. Millions of people use f.lux every day - personally, it's the first thing I install on any PC or Laptop I know I'll be using for a while.
It doesn't matter whether you have proof one way or the other.
I give a shit, because if I'm going to use it, I want to know if it's going to do anything. Why suffer through the filtering it does to my monitor if it doesn't matter?
Light is light except when you have multiple sources of light, some white and some blue, due to backlight leakage that happens to varying degrees in every LCD screen.
Do you know how much white light would negate the blue light in your brain, negating the effects? I don't.
Woah, awesome! It'll be interesting to see how Apple responds to this sort of instillation. I image with this publicity on HN we'll see other devs taking advantage of this instillation option to bring third party apps to users who are not jailbroken.
I think this should just be a builtin at this point, and in fact it would have been by now if it weren't for the walled-garden policies of the new gatekeepers of the modern technological world.
Also, be careful, if you call IOMobileFramebufferSetGammaTable with invalid arguments it will cause your screen to go black until you set a valid gamma table or reboot.
I'm a bit uncomfortable side loading an unsigned binary blob on my device. Does anyone know if it's possible to see the source and compile it from scratch?
I've done that and it was a pain in the ass to get working. It worked, albeit slowly. I didn't try to deploy to an iOS device from there, is that possible/relatively easy too?
Stop with "sideloading." It's a silly term. It's just installing software, and making it sound weird with a useless neologism is part of the whole power grab that vendors have tried to ride in with mobile.
