Please create a basic slider
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I saw a post from someone the other day asking for this a simple slider they could access without going into the preference settings, and I was going to leave a short note asking for the same thing. I saw that they received a very long, kinda snide reply from f.lux however, saying that they know best the light you should be experiencing and when because of their/your research.
I don't know about anyone else, but when apps start trying to tell me how I should control my life and experience, rather than just letting me control their interface how I need to - such as Apple's 'Bedtime' - I get incredibly pissed off. When I got notified that 'Apple has figured out when if your optimal bedtime' I wanted to throw my phone at the wall and run for the hills. Inuring your users to socialised control via apps that are meant to serve one pretty basic service - like an alarm clock or light settings - is incredibly dangerous route for tech companies to be going down.
Yes, you may have done a lot of research into circadian rhythms which is awesome and appreciated, but approaching the consumer like they are too stupid to know what they need is erring on the side of social control. Every time I get a whiff of this with many of the new apps and interfaces - happening more and more frequently - it runs my blood cold.
Some people such as myself, have an atypical need to control how they interact with light. Not everyone's body corresponds with general circadian rhythms and this has been observed in sleep studies. Not allowing your users to easily control how their light is managed, means I have to go into the f.lux preferences up to 20 times per day - sometimes more if I am working at night - to manually change the 'bedtime' so that I can work properly. It is really frustrating to have to go into the app and change the time constantly because I don't keep 'normal' hours, rather than intuitively just using a slider.
Sure, maybe this sounds overly dramatic, but I came to the forum (a few days ago) only to write 'can you please make a slider,' and I wouldn't have written such a comment about all this if I hadn't already seen your response to that person (I couldn't find that post to write this underneath).
On this general topic of user control, using commands like 'the sun is up- go outside' and 'you're getting sleepy' seriously infantilises your user. Again, we aren't naughty children that need to be given a curfew. Every person is affected by bluelight, but many, many people don't have the privilege of getting outside and playing in the sunshine. Why speak to them this way?
If you want to stay competitive now that Apple is so blatantly ripping you off (typically disgusting, unethical behaviour from them which I am very sorry to you for), I suggest dropping this kind of language and treating and speaking to your users like the autonomous adults they are.
I am definitely going to always stick with f.lux over Apple's bogus version, because I am so appreciative f.lux has existed while Apple were so focused as usual on militantly controlling the 'user experience' that they deprived millions (billions?) of people of a feature that would actually help them be healthier and happier.
I know this comment is a critique, but I wouldn't write such a long-winded, detailed comment if I didn't want to see you succeed and appreciate what you do. Thanks for making my sleep better for so long. Please add more functions for those of us who want more user control, and I will happily keep supporting you forever
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People definitely want to do other things than affect circadian timing, though that is our major focus and where we think software has a really big role to play.
Can you say a little bit about what your schedule is like and how you want to use it?
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Interesting...🤔
I am a nurse and considering my ever-changing work shifts , I understand your problems thoroughly. [anyway it's irrelevant right now.] But how could you be so self righteous??
Since no money had been paid by you for f.lux so not you nor anybody else is a customer here let alone be the consumer!
So so stop nagging and complaining! if you hate DICTATING so stop being a CONFORMIST too.
Or you could just disable "Backward Alarm clock" in the options 😒 -
Thanks for the comments - we are thinking about this a lot.
The main issue is that we are trying to give advice that has taken us years of study to understand, and yet the software is in a state where some people feel like they are losing control (they don't understand it or it feels too inflexible), and that's no good.
We are treating f.lux as a promise to help most people sleep better, and we take this really seriously. I think there is another path where we just do "what looks better" and don't take the sleep science seriously, and then you'd be in control, but we might not be able to do as much good, and we couldn't make it better over time.
As @nothreek notes, we are not doing a good job for shift work yet, so often people on these schedules are more expert at their schedule than the software is today.
Regarding adopting "always-the-same clock time" schedules: people adjust to the seasons very differently based on their biology and location, and this is the number one reason we don't have a "clock time" setting for adjusting nighttime lighting. This has been a really contentious decision - but for most people, we think this number should change throughout the year and based on your location and travel.
If we made a really prominent setting (as some companies have) where you have to choose "change at this time", then we would have to respect that setting forever, even if we later realize it's doing a very bad job in the winter for some people, or for people at the edge of a timezone. And actually, we are about 99% sure this is true - lighting that doesn't adjust with the seasons is going to screw some people up. So when there are things missing, it's because it ties us into a solution we think would be wrong in the long term.
There are indeed people who actually do know better, and we should not prevent full customization for them, but the interface is making that difficult because 90% of people do not dig in like that (they use the defaults), and so we are avoiding settings that would prevent us from doing better in the future. But we should use the wisdom of people who are very aware of this to help solve the problem.
I am sorry we are slow to ship the newer flexible scheduling we are working on, but I hope we can solve many of these things soon.
