f.lux beta (another thread)
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Our new build 4.21 has some estimations for the circadian impact of your screen. Post bugs and discussion here! (The old thread was getting big so I made a new one).
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Feedback on the Beta:
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I do not get up at the same time every day. This means the 'earliest wake time feature' is actually a hinderance.
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The interface has become exponentially more complicated - I really think you're going to lose the mass audience very quickly here.
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I don't like prompts telling me 'I'm getting sleepy' at 5pm. I'm not getting sleepy, and I don't wish to be told how I'm feeling.
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What are the purpose of all these whacky colour modes for which I cannot countenance a use? I can't help feeling the next update will be flashing disco lights and then all hope is lost.
Thank you
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@dr_zoidberg590 Thanks for your thoughts on the beta.
The earliest wake time is just that, the earliest time in the week you expect you'll wake up. This is based in the biology of the circadian melatonin rhythm, which requires strong periods of light and dark. Your sleep timing can be different every day, but your body is made to see light on a 24 hour rhythm.
Also - you should not be getting a 'you're getting sleepy' prompt at 5PM unless you have some nonstandard wake times set up. Maybe there's a unique use case we should know more about here?
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- (Wake Time Setting) Can you say why? Is it because you expect it to match your alarm clock and it doesn't, or because you just don't like the schedule?
- (Too complicated) I agree somewhat, and we are simplifying. It is harder to solve this problem if you consider how it actually affects a person, instead of picking nice colors. We have 100 years of artificial lighting that keeps people up too late, and it is a big project to change this. But with this direction, we are trying to move the public discussion away from pseudo-science and placebo, where it's trending right now.
- (Bedtime alerts) Do you have your wake time set to 2AM? Let us know something about your schedule and maybe we can help fix it.
- (Color modes) Actually, each color mode has a specific purpose, many of them for eyestrain during the day (so for most people they are not used everyday). We might need to make these settings use less space.
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It would be good to have a manual "going to sleep time" (maybe next to the wake time in the interface) now that the days are getting longer there might be the need to got to bed while the sun is still up.
And an app recognition for movie mode would be great, that turns it on automatically if for example VLC is running.
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Updating to 4.21, I discovered that the application crashes consistently when closed. Which is not something I do very often, but since the installer closed it to update the files, the crash window popped up.
I can reproduce this consistently, I just need to close the application from the system tray menu and I get two exception notifications. The first one is for a BEX event (buffer overflow exception) and the second is the resulting APPCRASH.
The screen remains tinted, which suggests the crash happens before F.lux tries to transition back to the normal temperature. Happy to do more tests or send you logs if it helps.
Also:
- a more detailed changelog would help us give you better feedback!
- interesting psd-based UI toolkit, is it a custom library?
- the original thread is still stickied
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@dreadnaut Yes we will check it - are you using any home automation features? I know of one case where the hue pairing will crash if you exit too fast...
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My wake time is set to 8:45am, so not sure why i got the alert at 5pm-ish. As for the colour modes, how is for example 'working late' different to just letting flux do it's normal cycle?
It's kind of confusing to have the Custom colours drop-drown, but also Change Colour to... in the menu. It's not clear how they're different and there's no tooltip to explain what for example, 'far from the equator' is actually going to do.
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@dr_zoidberg590 said in f.lux beta (another thread for 4.21):
My wake time is set to 8:45am, so not sure why i got the alert at 5pm-ish. As for the colour modes, how is for example 'working late' different to just letting flux do it's normal cycle?
It's kind of confusing to have the Custom colours drop-drown, but also Change Colour to... in the menu. It's not clear how they're different and there's no tooltip to explain what for example, 'far from the equator' is actually going to do.
You can see the differences in the side of the UI that has the 3 sliders. Open the menu and choose "Adjust all colors at once". You can do this each time you choose a new preset to see what the differences are.
When it says "Custom Colors", it means that you have chosen your own color temperature setup. The menu isn't called "Custom Colors". It will simply say whatever your current selection is (unless again you have set up your own color temperature settings).
I think that it would be nice of "Custom Colors" were an available selection from the menu so that we can go back to our custom color setup.
I personally feel that the "Change color to" menu is partly for fun while also being for specific purposes, like reducing eyestrain as herf said.
Obviously though, you don't have to use features just because they're there (like "Change color to", or any of the presets, etc.). Michael and Lorna are simply trying to make an app that the majority will love and each person who uses it will have different things they love about f.lux and different ways to use it. So, if you don't have any need for a feature, then maybe just pretend it doesn't exist or something. I would bet that some people do use those colors or the presets, and if so, then hey great. I don't use them nor do I care for them.
Really, I don't let f.lux do anything automatically because I don't need it to and I don't want it to. I even deleted the Registry subkey that makes f.lux start with Windows. So, I also ignore the wake-up time and the 3 different modes (Daytime, Sunset and Bedtime). Instead, I use f.lux for just 1 color temperature: 800K. I don't launch f.lux until I want 800K which means I don't have f.lux running in the background all day.
So in other words, my use of f.lux is 100% "on-demand" - I do everything manually (well to me, "everything" is just one simple thing). I don't use any of the color presets or anything else. For me, f.lux is 800K, and 800K is f.lux. That's all I care about and that's all I need. I don't need the "Change color to" menu or the preset menu, or the option to use a wider slider range of 1200K - 9300K, I don't use Darkroom Mode, Movie Mode or anything. When I'm ready to end my day and begin winding down so that I can fall asleep easily, I simply open f.lux and it quickly warms the color temperature to 800K for me because I have all 3 modes set to 800K (Daytime, Sunset and Bedtime). The reason why is, I don't have a consistent day/night schedule. So my "day" is simply when I'm awake. Oh, and when I say it "quickly" warms the color temperature up, I mean it: I have the "Very Fast" transition speed set (but even that's not quite fast enough for me lol).
For the record, I also switch my indoor lighting to low brightness pure red lights, I reduce my monitor's brightness to as low as it goes at this time and I also block out 100% of the light that comes in through my windows if there's any daylight out or if there will be daylight coming while I'm still trying to sleep (I use Blackout EZ Window Covers for that).
What I'm really saying is, it sounds to me like most of the features in f.lux may be of no use to you. If so, then that's fine. Just ignore them and use f.lux the way that works best for you.
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@dr_zoidberg590 yes it shouldn't notify you at all until closer to midnight - if this happens again, please send a note.
The goal of this interface is to make the schedule more customized over time while not overwhelming people with controls. So the main slider and the "change color..." selector are all about the current color, which is how we expect most people might think about it.
I think we also probably did ok for advanced users ("setting up your friend's computer") with "All sliders at once" but we don't expect most people to use this, so we hid it just a bit.
Then I agree with you that we don't visually distinguish between the presets pulldown ("set your whole schedule at once" or "undo the thing you did") vs. the rest of the adjustments ("what should happen right now"). We probably should think of a way to indicate that it's the whole schedule at once.
One idea in the design is this: if you've never seen f.lux before and you've just installed at noon, you really can't guess how you want it to look at midnight. In most cases, you have to come back and do it later, or use a preset and hopefully our choices are good enough. But fine-tuning your midnight settings during the day almost always gets you to the wrong place, so we make it harder to do.
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@herf said in f.lux beta (another thread for 4.21):
@dr_zoidberg590 yes it shouldn't notify you at all until closer to midnight - if this happens again, please send a note.
The goal of this interface is to make the schedule more customized over time while not overwhelming people with controls. So the main slider and the "change color..." selector are all about the current color, which is how we expect most people might think about it.
I think we also probably did ok for advanced users ("setting up your friend's computer") with "All sliders at once" but we don't expect most people to use this, so we hid it just a bit.
Then I agree with you that we don't visually distinguish between the presets pulldown ("set your whole schedule at once" or "undo the thing you did") vs. the rest of the adjustments ("what should happen right now"). We probably should think of a way to indicate that it's the whole schedule at once.
One idea in the design is this: if you've never seen f.lux before and you've just installed at noon, you really can't guess how you want it to look at midnight. In most cases, you have to come back and do it later, or use a preset and hopefully our choices are good enough. But fine-tuning your midnight settings during the day almost always gets you to the wrong place, so we make it harder to do.
Exactly. A super-warm color temperature during the day when you've only been awake for a few hours feels extremely different than it does when you've been awake for a long time and you need to go to sleep. So, testing settings during the day isn't as helpful as testing them when you want to be sleepy. When I choose like say 1200K but it's bright and sunny out, I might get the wrong that impression that 1200K will be waaaaay too much at night when I'm getting ready for bed.
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I have some feedback about the new upper-right corner notification: I like the old one better because it had a much higher visibility. When this one comes up, I don't really notice it because it doesn't make me look at it like the old one did. When the old one came up, I felt automatically drawn to look at it. So, I think the best one is a very bright one with a big font, etc.
The first time I experienced the new notification, I thought f.lux was broken because I thought nothing came up. So, I looked up where the notification should be and realized at that moment that f.lux has a new notification. With the old one, it almost forces the eyes to look at it as soon as it appears because we tend to instinctively look at things like that in our peripheral, like things that move or things that suddenly appear out of nowhere. This one doesn't grab my attention at all.
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Installed version 4.21
Issues that are gone:
- When entering a game the screen went brighter (f.lux temperatures changed)
- When closing f.lux i needed to wait 15-20 seconds in order to launch it again
Now it keeps temperatures and i can close it and re-open right away. Good job.
Just one note: Despite working as intended when launching games when you Alt + Tab you see the daytime (6500K e.g) temperature for like 1 sec and then it goes back (instant) to the right temperature (2000K e.g). Both sides, tabbing in and out.
Another thing i noticed: when watching videos and entering fullscreen (i tested on youtube, twitch) screen goes brighter.
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By the way, when taking screenshots or recording videos, this happens:
http://i.imgur.com/EM9pnZF.png -
@disqQ yes we do this when you haven't rebooted yet, or when you're using a USB monitor.
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@herf which situation are you talking about that requires a reboot? I don't use any USB monitors.
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Are we still asking for reboot at install? It should...
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Well, I was too fast to say my problems went away with 4.21. It only worked once. :(
Before I always had to open f.lux main window to make it update temperature to daylight when I started my computer in the morning. This morning, not even this worked. Now I had to take a slider and move it all the way to 5500k and the temperature was updated. Then I moved a slider back to 6500k.
Could this be a problem with those old Radeon Catalyst drivers?
Edit: Looks like that when I start computer it's always low temperature even if it was daylight 6500k when I last turned computer off. :/
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@TwoCables Are you a Vampire? :D
PS: I dont have 800k option....where can i enable it? -
@sitayi2308 said in f.lux beta (another thread for 4.21):
@TwoCables Are you a Vampire? :D
PS: I dont have 800k option....where can i enable it?lol
Use the new keyboard shortcuts ('hotkeys') for changing the color temperature. Come on. :)
Hint: check out the f.lux options. Explore and discover. hehe
Oh and Mike, see I'm not the only one who wants 800K. I think the main slider should have 1 range: 800-6500K. If the user wants higher color temperatures than that, then that should be an option they can enable. Or, they can just use keyboard shortcuts.
