Some of the glasses which are with yellowish tint don’t do anything.

You need orange or red lenses for better blue light blocking.

If you can’t find orange or red blue light filter glasses you can try to use sunglasses instead of the ones with the yellowish tint.

Sunglasses block a lot more blue light than most blue blocking glasses and they also block UV light.

Some yellowish glasses may work but really be skeptical and search for a proof with some measurement.

At the end of this article, I talk about how you can test your blue blocking glasses.

Iris is much more effective because it actually stops the blue light before emitted and it’s customizable which means that you can control the amount of blue light.

If you use glasses you also still get light to your head and to your skin.

This may not cause melanopsin response but still, it’s better to place a transparent blue blocking sheet on your screen.

How to test how much blue light is blocked?

Look at the image below with your blue blocking glasses on your face or your blue blocking filter on your screen

If the blue blocking filter is good you shouldn’t be able to see the B letter and the entire blue color should be black.

Here is an example with Iris set on Sleep type which blocks all blue and all green light

When all blue light and all green light is blocked you only see nuances of the red color.

Here is set to Health and Manual mode which blocks a lot of blue light and a little green light

You see that there is remaining blue and remaining green and also the screen is a little dimmer.

Based on a lot of talking with users and a lot of talking with doctors this is preset which is the best to not feel eye pain and eye strain.

However, if you want to block all blue light for best sleep you may need to go to the Blue light page and set the color temperature to around 1900K or around 29% from the Iris slider.

In this case, some of the green light is also blocked because Melanopsin also responds to some of the green light.

You can see these measurements in the latest medical researches when you search for something like sleep response to green light in Google.

Here is some study from Harvard: Green Light Affects Circadian Rhythm

If you still just want to remove only blue light without some green light you can switch to Groot color scheme.

Example picture of how this color scheme looks like

When you set this color scheme and set blue light to 0% from the Blue light page all blue light is reduced without reducing the green light.

Maybe you now understand why Iris is much more powerful than any other physical filter.

With several clicks, you can do everything with Iris and while you need to buy new glasses or filter for every different reduction with Iris you can just open the menu.

Video

Infographic

Daniel
CEO Iris Technologies

Publishing date: 07.05.2018

The post Iris vs Physical Blue blocking filters appeared first on 💡👨‍💻 Iris - Software for Eye protection, Health and Productivity 🛌👀.

F.lux is a popular blue light filter program, but I personally hated several things about this program.

When I started to have eye problems in 2015 I wanted to be able to manually control the blue light of my screen. I found f.lux while reading one article about how to feel less eye strain, but what I didn’t like about it was that it was somehow focused on sleep which was not my problem.

I had awesome sleep, but I was feeling really bad eye strain when I used computers. I wrote to the dev team if they can add custom control of the blue light and schedule by time, but they didn’t respond to me.

And this is how I decided to add blue light and color temperature to Iris.

In this article, I want to make a general comparison between the 2 programs, but take my words with a little grain of salt since I’m a little tendentious 😀

What f.lux is missing?

Let’s first start with f.lux 3 which was somehow the first version of f.lux and was actually better than the new f.lux 4 beta which is bloated with not needed features.

Fundamentals

The f.lux app main assumption is that blue light is bad for your sleep. Not exactly bad, but we are made to have day and night cycle of light and at night you should lower blue light to sleep better.

This is good. This is true. Melatonin secretion stops when our eye sees blue light.

But do people problem is actually bad sleep or it is eye pain?

Sleep vs Eye pain

I and 99% of all other people who use blue light reduction software use it because we feel less eye strain when we remove the blue light from our screen at night.

So I don’t actually need this day and night cycle of the Sun thing. I don’t actually need to sleep better.

I train a lot, eat good and even with a cup of coffee before bed I sleep well. What my problem really is is that I feel a lot of eye pain from my constant work in front of computer screens.

This is a fundamental problem. I don’t need all of this day and night graphics of how light affects my sleep and what value is best to sleep better.

I just want 1 slider with 0% and 100% blue light.

That’s it. I want to set the blue light to my comfortable value and maybe automate this based on the time of the day.

It’s not only the melatonin suppression effect. It’s the strong wavelength of blue light which enters deep into our retina causes eye strain and macular degeneration in the long run.

Color temperature vs Blue light

And what is this color temperature anyway?

Most people are not familiar with the black body color and this color temperature thing only makes them more confused.

In the past, people often asked me What is the best Color temperature?.

At one point I just realized that this whole color temperature scale thing is broken and it will actually be better to have a blue light slider from 0 to 100%.

After some time it becomes comfortable to work with the color temperature values but why waste your time learning science.

Sun vs Time

For me, it’s quite unclear why you are locked for only selecting the time and to base day and night calculations only on Sun position.

This is quite helpful when you want more precise control of the lighting outside but combined with strange geographic locations it may give wrong values at the wrong time.

Also, f.lux can’t automatically detect your location without using Geolocation which brings me to the next point.

Geolocation vs Approximation

Software like f.lux can easily detect location with only internet request by approximation which is what Iris does.

Geolocation uses a lot of battery and can be used to track users positions which is also not good in terms of privacy.

If something is free you are the product of sale. Why Facebook and Google are free?

Because they both track your every move and advertise based on your activity. I don’t want to tell anything bad, but free software often sell user data to make money.

Free vs Paid

Free software is great because it’s free but you often don’t have any customer support. Since you almost can’t make a living from donations you work a side job and you don’t care much about the product.

In the beginning, I also made Iris free, but after a year full-time work and 0$ donations, I decided to make it Freemium with Pro version.

The reason why f.lux make so little changes and listen to users so little is because it’s free. Free software with good customer support sell ads or user data.

I personally hate programs with ads and tracking users is just unethical and plain evil. Totally free and open source programs don’t have any support for bugs and problems.

This is the reason why I think freemium or paid software is actually much better.

Locked values

One of the things I hated when I started using f.lux is that I was unable to go lower than 2700K during the day. 1200K and other values were available only during the night.

But what if you are in a really dark room during the day. Or you are even going to be night shift and you want to shift your sleep times.

You need to open Google maps and find a location with some close latitude and longitude to the timezone you desire. It was just crazy.

PWM flicker

For eye pain and eye problems, blue light is actually not the biggest problem.

Screen illumination, PWM flicker, and generally bright screens are a much bigger problem for our eyes.

F.lux doesn’t include a solution for PWM flicker and this is one of the reasons why Iris is much better. Iris has an automatic brightness reduction without flicker based on time or location in combination with a blue light reduction.

Room lighting

Screen brightness should match the room lighting and the monitor should not look like a light source in the room. Otherwise, our eye starts to move like this

This is a bigger amplitude to show the effect of course but the idea is simple.

Your monitor should not actually adapt to the Sunlight but to the light around you and the light in your room. You can achieve this with light detection from the camera or from the easy manual control of the brightness.

Both ways are not part of f.lux and are part of Iris. Camera detection is disabled by default because it’s creepy some software to use your camera, but you can enable it from the AI page of Iris.

Eye rest

One of the most underestimated things for eye health is to take regular breaks and look at distant objects.

F.lux doesn’t include a solution for this while Iris has several different timer modes based on strictness and customizable timing.

One of the most popular ophthalmologist health advice is the 20-20-20 rule which goes like this:

Every 20 minutes, take a 20-second break and focus your eyes on something at least 20 feet away.

Rest is important for moisturizing our eyes and for general eye strain relief.

Fonts

Most modern font rendering technologies are bad for the eyes. Here I talk about font smoothing which makes the fonts blurry.

Our eye moves in patterns called cascades and we need sharp edges to focus easily.

When font smoothing is used the letters became blurred and we struggle to find a focus point on the screen.

This may cause eye pain and headaches in the beginning and in the long run, you may need to put even glasses.

You can’t change font smoothing with f.lux.

With Iris, you can choose between different font rendering techniques and find what is comfortable for you from the Fonts page.

Easy to use user interface

Here is a picture from the old f.lux version 3:

And here is a picture from the new f.lux 4:

I know that the first versions of Iris were actually worse with 25 pages of settings, but after a lot of talking with users we packaged it in presets and it’s really intuitive.

In 2017 we made also one feature which a lot of people asked for and this was the presets of Iris. After some time something similar also appeared in the new version of f.lux.

Moon

Moon cycles affect our sleep as much as blue light and this is another thing that the f.lux team didn’t take into account.

It’s not only the melatonin blocking from blue light. The moon moves entire oceans and our sleep time moves when the moon moves.

If you want to read more about the moon’s influence on our circadian rhythms you can read this and similar researches. Here is a quote from the text:

“Lunar rhythms are not as evident as circadian rhythms and are thus not easy to document but they exist. Our findings of a 20 min shorter sleep duration, a 5 min longer time to fall asleep, and a 30% decrease in deep sleep are not small changes. ”

Iris is the only solution in the world right now which takes moon phases into account and regulates the blue light also based on the moon phase.

This regulation is even customizable from the Moon page in Iris Pro.

Blue light reduction during the day

f.lux doesn’t have any blue light reduction during the day which is also bad.

Doctors recommend actually using low blue light or 1200K the whole day and spending time outside to get full-spectrum sunlight.

As you can see from the picture above the Sunlight is really different from the light emitted from our electronic devices and LED screens to emit too much blue light all the time.

This is why some blue light reduction is needed even during the day.

f.lux doesn’t make any reduction during the day.

Iris Types have blue light reduction also during the day.

Shortcuts

Shortcuts are one more thing f.lux falls short on. While in version 3 you don’t have any way to customize or disable the shortcuts the good thing in version 4 is that at least you can disable them.

With Iris, you can customize the keys of all shortcuts and most features from the Shortcuts page.

Color pausers

While there is some part solution in the f.lux newest version in f.lux version 3 which in my opinion was actually simpler there was no way to pause and disable f.lux while certain programs like Photoshop are running.

This is useful for designers and artists who need exact colors when they work with colors or paint something.

In f.lux 3 there is no solution to this problem. In the newest f.lux 4, there is a big improvement and you can select your latest programs from the tray menu

The problem is that this is not the best user-friendly design and also some people want to create a list of programs without the need to start the program to remove it from the list.

Iris has both these features available from the tray menu and from the main user interface.

Iris also gives you the ability to add your own custom programs from a list.

Part screen blue light reduction

While the color pausers feature is useful, sometimes part screen blue light reduction is needed for long periods of work with colors.

With f.lux you don’t have any solution for this while with Iris you can select a part of the screen to be with normal colors and the other part of the screen to be with reduced blue light.

Zoom

Looking at small texts can be straining for the eyes and magnification is yet another area in which f.lux doesn’t have any solution.

Some programs have automatic zoom, but I like this example when on YouTube there are some videos that are displayed on only half of the screen. Even on fullscreen, the subtitles are small. Example

With Iris, you can magnify the screen and watch it like this

You can see the shortcuts to Zoom in and Zoom out from the Magnification page.

Color schemes

Some people want to remove only blue light without removing the green color and this is one more area in which you can’t find a solution in f.lux.

F.lux removes the green light from 6500K downwards. One of the reasons for this is that they wrongly use the color temperature scale to reduce the blue light.

The good thing about this is that the green pixel in modern monitors actually emits also blue light but I’m not sure if they have measured this much this.

Some people just don’t want to remove the green light when they decrease blue light and with Iris color schemes you can do this.

From the Color schemes page, you can select different color schemes.

Some of them like Magmus is more aggressive while Olaf is an exact match of the f.lux color scheme.

Iris color scheme is the measured best which most people like and is a combination of the best from every scheme but what we are interested in here is the Groot color scheme.

Groot removes only blue light without touching the green light all the way down to 0% blue light from the slider which you may find useful.

USB Monitors

Iris was the first software which was working also on USB monitors and monitors connected from docking station like DisplayLink. I made this with the help of new API I created back in 2016

This enabled me to access the video card interface at one level higher and change the gamma without actually the need of gamma support through the cable.

Well, I guess f.lux was really inspired by this because in their new f.lux 4 they made this groundbreaking innovation with a fix for USB monitors.

I guess this is no more innovation of Iris, but nevermind. I am making backlight level control right now which is 10 times more effective than any gamma approach and also reduces battery life 🙂

Blue mouse

There was this problem in f.lux that there was no way to change the cursor color and it’s always bright:

Iris was the first software to add an option for changing the color of the cursor also like this:

I called this software cursor and it can be enabled from the System page. This setting is also available in the free version of Iris.

With the new version of f.lux, they also added this option to the interface. There is this option in f.lux 4:

The problem isn’t exactly this.

After I added this a lot of people wrote to me that the cursor is not shown when they play fullscreen games.

This is a problem with which f.lux still doesn’t have a solution. In Iris, there is the Mouse pausers page.

From here you can select which programs to disable the software mouse when running.

With this, you can enjoy orange cursor when you browse your PC and you will also be able to see the cursor when you play games in fullscreen.

Localization

One more downside of f.lux is that the program is available only in English.

Since Iris has distributors all over the world it’s available in many other languages.

Best translations are English, Bulgarian, Chinese and Japanese, but Iris is available in 17 different languages at the moment and everyone who wants to help with the localization to his native language can do this from the How to translate Iris page 🙂

Documentation

The users of f.lux are really great at helping each other in the forum there seems to be no official documentation of how to use the program.

The closest thing to documentation is the f.lux FAQ page.

In Iris, all things have blue information labels that open the corresponding help page for every feature.

You can also find all Iris help pages from the Help page.

Improvements in f.lux v4

F.lux 3 was really great in that it was super lightweight and simple to use.

F.lux 4 came with major improvements like the DisplayLink USB monitors support, software mouse and the better custom control of values.

Aside from this, the UI seems a little overcomplicated now.

Why Iris is better than f.lux?

It’s not only the Blue light.

There is also PWM flicker, Font rendering, Subpixel flicker, Temporal dithering, Rests, and ease of use.

Iris takes care of all things related to eye health and sleep.

While I understand why some people don’t like Iris, because it’s not absolutely free, you need to understand that to make money companies either show you ads constantly, sell your user data or just make great paid products.

With Iris, I wanted to create a great free product and great paid product. The so-called freemium model.

Bellow I also created one table with a comparison of Iris mini, Iris, Iris mini Pro, Iris Pro, and f.lux. I hope you enjoyed this article 🙂

Note!
The fields marked with are partly on not really well-implemented features.

I did change Iris to be free trial recently but you can still download free Iris from these links: Windows, macOS

Final words

If you liked or hated this article share it with friends 🙂

I tried to make some basic comparison between Iris and f.lux.

We work really hard to make Iris the best blue light filter and eye protection software. And it’s not only us, but we also talk every day with users. We also have more than 500+ only positive Facebook reviews and Google reviews and are really proud of this 🙂

I also give you my word that if you for some reason buy Iris and are not 100% satisfied with the product we will either fix all your problems or return your money. You can read also about our Refund promise.

Daniel Georgiev
Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
Iris Technologies EOOD
https://iristech.co/

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The post Best alternative to f.lux appeared first on 💡👨‍💻 Iris - Software for Eye protection, Health and Productivity 🛌👀.

Night Shift is the Apple native integrated blue light reduction feature. Night Shift was first introduced on March 21, 2016 as part of the iOS 9.3.

1 year after Night Shift first arrived for iPhone on Mar 27, 2017 Apple finally added it also to Mac OSX or as now is called macOS. The goal of this review is to show you how to use Night Shift to sleep better and protect your eyes.

Description

System requirements

Now let’s first see if your Mac natively supports Night Shift. I will show you later how to enable Night Shift on older Mac machines.

First of all, in order to get Night Shift, you need macOS Sierra 10.12.4 or newer versions of macOS. You can’t get Nigth Shift on older versions of the operating system.

If you have the appropriate macOS version then you should be able to use Night Shift. Night Shift in natively supported on this Mac computers, using the built-in display or the displays listed:

• MacBook (Early 2015 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer)
• Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer)
• iMac (Late 2012 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Late 2013 or newer)
• Apple LED Cinema Display
• Apple Thunderbolt Display
• LG UltraFine 5K Display
• LG UltraFine 4K Display

If you have some of these electronics you are lucky, but if not I will show you how to trick your Mac into thinking that it’s a newer model and thus enabling Night Shift.

There are no actual special requirements for Night Shift, Apple just wants you to buy new MacBook. If you have old MacBook and you really want to Night Shift the first thing you need to do is to disable System Integrity Protection.

Before we start anything I want to tell that this is only needed for Mac machines which are not on the above list. If you see your machine on the above list you have Night Shift in the System preferences and you can access it without any other effort.

This hacking steps are only for people with macOS Sierra 10.12.4 and older Mac machines. If you are read this carefully let’s disable System Integrity Protection.

Disable SIP

To disable System Integrity Protection restart your Mac and hold

Command+R

This is the Command key plus R. If you don’t know how the Command key looks like and you use Apple keyboard look for this button

On other keyboards the Command key is actually the Windows key like in the picture bellow

Hold Command+R until you see the Apple logo

Now you Mac will load into Recovery mode.

Choose the language and click Next

This is how the actually Recovery mode or macOS Utilities looks like

Ignoring the macOS Utilities window to disable System Integrity Protection you need to go to Utilities and then to click Terminal

Terminal windows will open and just enter the following command and press Enter

csrutil disable

This will disable System Integrity Protection (SIP). You can enable System Integrity Protection again at any time by doing the above steps again and writing into the Terminal window

csrutil enable

After you have disabled System Integrity Protection restart your Mac normally.

Patching

When System Integrity Protection is disabled we can now patch your Mac to enable Night Shift. The procedure of patching is pretty straighforward and I choosed to show you how to use this patch:

https://github.com/TMRJIJ/Night-Shift-on-Unsupported-Macs

Download the repository from the link above. If for some reason the link becomes death use the button bellow to download the Night Shift patch.

When you download this file it will automatically extract to the following folder

Double click or Right click and click open macOS Night Shift Enabler.mpkg file. This will start the installer. You will probably get this error message

To fix this go to System Preferences -> Security and Privacy and click Open Anyway

Click Open again

Now the macOS Night Shift Enabler installer will start and just follow the steps. Click continue to run the script which will determine if Night Shift Enabler can be installed

Click Continue again

Read the Read Me and click Continue

Agree with the License

Finally click Install

After a couple of seconds the installation will be complete and Night Shift will be unlocked on your old Mac. Click Restart to restart your PC in order for the patch to take effect.

After restart you can find Night Shift into the System preferences window.

Night Shift

Up until now we was setting your Mac if you don’t have Night Shift enabled by default. Now that you have Night Shift it’s time to review where to find it and how to use it.

To use Night Shift open the System Preferences. The button may be in the dock if not search it with Spotlight

From the System Preferences window choose Displays

And now you would be able to see the Night Shift tab

If you don’t see the Night Shift tab you don’t have the latest macOS Sierra or you have not applied the Patch from the previous step.

Some Mac machines support Night Shift so the patch is not needed, but this is only for new machines as listed on the System Requirements in the beginning of this article.

Click the Night Shift tab to see the Night Shift settings

Here you see several settings:

Schedule

Schedule is used for when the Night Shift will be turned On and when it will be Off.  You can set several different types of schedule. To have Night Shift turn on automatically at certain times, choose an option.

Off

Don’t schedule a time for Night Shift (if you choose this, you can still turn on Night Shift manually).

Even if Night Shift schedule is set to Off you can enable it by clicking the Manual checkbox

Custom

Choose the times when Night Shift turns on and off.

If you select the Custom schedule you will see time pickers bellow the Schedule dropdown

You can change by sunrise and sunset times by clicking the from or to box and writing new time with the keyboard or by clicking the arrows to the right

Sunset to Sunrise

Turn on Night Shift from sunset to sunrise.

To use this option, turn on Location Services in Security & Privacy preferences.

Go to System Preferences and click Security & Privacy

Go to the Privacy tab

Click the lock icon if the options are grayed out and unlock the options

Now when the options are unlocked click Enable Location Services

Next to System Services click Details

Click Settings Time Zone and click Done

Night Shift Sunset to Sunrise schedule is now setup correctly

Manual

Select to turn on Night Shift, deselect to turn it off. Night Shift remains on until the next day or until you turn it off.

If Night Shift is off, select the checkbox to turn Night Shift on until 7 a.m. If you’re using a schedule, Night Shift automatically turns off at the scheduled time.

If Night Shift is on, deselect the checkbox to turn Night Shift off. If you’re using a schedule, Night Shift turns on again at the scheduled time.

Color Temperature

Drag the slider to change the color temperature Night Shift uses.

More Warm color temperature means less blue light while Less Warm color temperature means more blue light.

For the best sleep and eye health move the slider to the most right position

For the least amount of blue light reduction and color changes move the slider to the most right position

Night Shift can go down to around 3400K which is still to much blue light if you want to really shift your sleep cycle, but it’s still nice and useful integrated feature.

If you want more blue light reduction you can try Iris.

Download Now

AirPlay Display

Use AirPlay Mirroring to wirelessly send what’s on your Mac to another display.

Show mirroring options in the menu bar when available

Show devices available for AirPlay Mirroring in the menu bar.

Gather Windows

Moves all open Displays preferences windows to the display where this button is. This button appears only if more than one display is connected to your Mac.

Final thoughts

Night Shift is good feature for a blue light reduction on your Mac. It will help you sleep better by reducing the amount of blue light emitted from your screen. This will also help your eyes hurt less when you sit in front of the computer late at night.

Thank you very much for reading this article. It’s important for us to try to make digital displays a little more healthy.

Daniel Georgiev – Founder of Iris

The post Night Shift Review (macOS) appeared first on 💡👨‍💻 Iris - Software for Eye protection, Health and Productivity 🛌👀.