Suggestion: The "backwards alarm clock" & Bedtime mode are the worst possible implementation of a great idea

eponymous

I love the idea of flux having a "Bedtime" during which the screen's colors are even warmer than the usual night colors. However, this implementation is completely unintuitive and so uncustomizable that it's functionally useless for the vast majority of users. (All you have to do is look at the f.lux forums--or even just do a general google search!--to find literally tens of thousands of people trying to figure out what the heck the "backwards alarm clock" alerts are for and how to stop them.)

The problem is that you're trying to do all the work for us without ever even explaining what the work is meant to DO. After digging into your forums, it turns out that "earliest wake time" is what automatically sets Bedtime as starting 9 hours before that point, and f.lux then puts the display into Bedtime colors for those nine hours. So when you're asking for our "earliest wake time," what you're ACTUALLY asking is what hours of the day our nine-hour Bedtime should include. You're adding a completely unnecessary, confusing step in the middle by asking a question that you THINK will get you a useful response (What's the earliest possible time you'll wake up?) versus what you REALLY need to know (What's the nine-hour span of time you're most likely to be asleep, or that you most need to ensure you're asleep?).

To keep things exactly the same as now, it would be more useful to:

Have the user set "the time by which you expect to be asleep on most nights" or "the time by which you need to be awake on most mornings."
DISPLAY NEXT TO THE SETTING the nine-hour Bedtime range that's currently calculated based on that bedtime or wakeup time. This will finally make it clear EXACTLY what the setting is doing, instead of requiring the user to work backwards from utterly ridiculous, nonsensical, obfuscatingly named settings. ("Earliest wake time" and "backwards alarm clock"??? Literally wtf do they even mean??? What are they doing??? Nobody knows!)
Otherwise, keep working the same as now (putting the display into Bedtime mode during those nine hours).

To make things FIVE THOUSAND PERCENT better:

Just... let us manually set the start and end of "bedtime"? Better yet, give us three options, for: (a) the same setting every day; (b) two different settings for work nights and nights with no work the next day (with the ability to designate which days are which, because not everybody has Saturday/Sunday as their weekend); and (b) a different setting for every day of the week, for people who might work odd schedules (four-day or six day weeks; working late one night a week; late appointments or activities on certain days of the week; etc.).

Nine hours might be an "average" "ideal" amount of bedtime (including time spent falling asleep and waking up), but the thing about averages is that the actual range of human experience is VASTLY wider than that. When I'm following my natural rhythm (which because I'm self-employed I've been able to do almost every night for the past eight years, so it's pretty reliable data at this point), I only sleep for about 7 hours. Until probably my mid/late 20s, I needed more like 10 hours per night. My girlfriend still needs close to 10 hours. Forcing everyone into the same "nine hours of bedtime" model, even aside from linking it to the meaningless statistic of "earliest wake time," is really useless for the way a lot of people live.

TL;DR: Stop asking the wrong questions, start tying settings explicitly and clearly into what the program is doing, and ideally just let us directly and completely control when f.lux is in Bedtime mode.