F.lux and Twilight Review-The Most Important Apps I’m Using
My sleep the past few months has not been great. A big change in my schedule, coupled with wild mood swings, has made it hard to actually fall asleep. When I do get to sleep, I wake up pretty often through the night from either nightmares or general restlessness. One way I try to wind down before bed is to read a comic, but this means staring at my bright tablet screen for 30 minutes. Looking at something so bright for so long — not to mention how long I spend on my laptop before “winding down” — is terrible for trying to turn my brain off and get some rest.
Last week, I saw Night Shift for the iOS 9.3 beta announced. Set a schedule and the screen will turn a yellow tint, getting rid of the blue light spectrum that is damaging to a healthy sleep cycle. Five minutes of Googling landed me a Windows program (f.lux) and an Android app (Twilight) that accomplishes the same thing.
We’ll start with f.lux. It’s available free for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and iOS. Download it, set your location, and the screen color will adjust based on the time of day. During the day, everything will look normal. Once the sun starts going down in your corner of the world, f.lux will adjust your screen to have the yellow tint. It’s subtle, but it works.
My eyes no longer hurt after staring at my screen in darkness too long. You can also pause the effect if you have to do any work that needs the full color spectrum like graphic design. F.lux is free to download and install from here, has no ads and is completely virus and malware free. I didn’t see an option to donate on their site, but will contact their development team and see if there’s a way to do that.
While f.ux doesn’t have an Android application, there are a number of apps that have the same effect. The one I decided on is Twilight, and I picked it frankly because it was the first one in the search results. I’m very happy with it though. Operation is similar to f.lux: set your location (either by having your GPS on or manually inputting your latitude and longitude), and it will shift the tint of your screen. By default, it shifts to a red tone, which is also effective at helping your eyes and brain relax at night.
You also get the option to change the tone, so I have mine set to match the yellow tone from f.lux. Like f.lux, you can pause the effect if you’d like. Upgrade to the pro version and you get to set additional schedules, can adjust the transition time and best of all, you can support the developer’s hard work. The free version can be installed from here.
My sleep is still very jacked up, and it’ll be a while before it’s truly fixed. But, when it’s time to relax and wind down, I can curl up with my favorite comics without straining my eyes more than need be. I have no problem recommend these two apps to anyone.
