Hey, you're right. I do suck at it. I'm not a customer service person. We don't have a support staff, which is one reason the icon's not hideable. People need to be able to see the icon so they can quickly disable it, change options, or even quit forever. Sorry to see you go, and thanks for your former support. Please let us know if we can ever help with a f.lux related question.

If our icon bugs you more than blue light at night, I don't have a better solution for you than uninstalling.

I know this is an old thread, but it's where duckduckgo landed me.

Yes, your icon bugs me more than blue light, and there are alternatives. I've been using f.lux since it's inception, I've donated to the cause, and now I'm deleting it because that attitude absolutely sucks. You really shouldn't be involved with customer service, @lorna, because you suck at it.

Works great!

http://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/

Here are some screenshots of what it looks like.

Not clicked on:

Clicked on:

This is not an ideal solution, since the menu bar isn't guaranteed to place the flux item at the far left, and its minimum width is set by the system item icon padding. But for a 2 minute fix, it's pretty good!


it's expressly against Apple human interface guidelines for an app to install an icon in the menu bar, with no way of hiding it:

Use status items sparingly and only if the alternatives (such as a Dock menu, preference pane, or status window) are not suitable. Because there is limited space in the menu bar in which to display status items, status items are not guaranteed to be available at all times. For this reason, do not rely on them being available and always provide a user preference for hiding your application’s status items to free up space in the menu bar.
-- From Mac Developer Library - Introduction to Status Bars

This is how people expect their Macs to behave. I have at least 50 apps that have a menu bar icon option, and only two of them - f.lux and dropbox - fail to provide a way to hide them. I only use menu bar icons that display some kind of status - time, weather, CPU usage, etc.

It's not only about having a "tidy" menu bar. Application menus override status items, and for example on an 11" MacBook, it's not unusual for an application with many menus to cause f.lux's icon to become hidden and inaccessible. With a Dock icon, this isn't a problem.

It's trivial for an app to show a Dock icon with a right-click menu having the same structure as the menubar icon's menu, and a simple preference to choose between them. The preference could go in the Options submenu. I'm not a Cocoa programmer, but I imagine it wouldn't take more than a couple of hours.

A more elegant system, which several people have pointed out is used by many similar apps, is to have two items on the Preferences screen, "Show in Menu Bar" and "Show in Dock", and allow them both to be deselected. Then, double-clicking on the application icon in the Finder opens the Preferences screen. Admittedly, this may be less useful with f.lux, because there would be no convenient way to access things like "Movie mode" or "Disable for an hour". That could be solved with Applescript support, which is also not terribly difficult to add, but that's another topic...

I see your point that users need a handle to access f.lux. But they also have the app sitting in the applications folder. Would it work that opening the app turns on the menu bar icon, but the menu bar menu has an option to hide the icon for that instance of the program? I don't think running an app will confuse non-power-users; that's been pretty standard since 1984. What I don't know is what could happen if they re-open an app (say, double-click the icon for) an app that's already running.

Thanks for the good program! Did I really pay nothing for it?

I guess it seems like a minor thing, but many people don't like to have a cluttered menu bar. I don't think it's a "power user" thing. Every other app I use, except DropBox, has the option to hide the menubar icon. Broomstick is an ugly and buggy hack that modifies application bundles, doesn't work properly, and is no longer supported. Bartender costs $15 ($18 in Europe), and has issues of its own.

Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, f.lux is very cool and great that it's free, so thanks for that! Just some feedback from a user's perspective.

We haven't included this option for the reasons listed above, but also because many of the people who install f.lux are not computer experts and would be lost without a simple way to control their settings and quit. Although it's not your particular need, many f.lux users need immediate control, for doing things like color checking or making adjustments.

I can relate to small visual details being annoying, but the icon's probably there to stay. Since you want to keep using f.lux, maybe an icon organizer would be a good idea for you.

A quick google search turns up some third party programs, http://macbartender.com/ is one such app - I don't know whether or not it is compatible with f.lux.

Is this a joke? Have you taken off the clock from the menu bar too?!

This is a completely valid feature request. I personally am rather surprised this option isn't included. I'd imagine a significant portion of the user base would never need to adjust the application's settings on a regular basis, but perhaps I'm ignorant on the matter.

As OP said, flux works very well; I at least don't need to reconfigure it on a regular basis. Its presence in the menu bar is nothing but visual clutter. Granted, @herf mentioned the trouble the implementation of this feature would incur, but I'd still greatly appreciate the ability to hide the icon, and clearly I'm not the only one.

@lorna said:

If our icon bugs you more than blue light at night, I don't have a better solution for you than uninstalling.

What an embarrassing official response. If I didn't appreciate flux so much for my eyes I'd uninstall immediately.

If you double-click the app icon while the app is already running, it opens the Preferences panel. So you could have a setting to allow f.lux to run without Dock OR Menubar, but opening the app a second time in Finder pulls up settings/controls.

Of course, you would have to add the full controls to the Settings screen or something similar. But it's totally doable.

For example, both aText and Typinator work this way. (They're both auto-replace typing accessories.)

However, when you hide the only access to your app, you need another way to get to it. We don't have this, and so we can't hide yet.

@herf, could you do it like windows and when f.lux is clicked in the applications just bring up settings?