f.lux was basically unusable in its previous version that was tied to sunset. In Toronto, for example, f.lux would start kicking in at 5pm in the winter which is no where near most people's bedtimes.
My solution was to continually disable it for an hour at a time until I had enough and uninstalled it. Happy to be able to try it out again.
It is my understanding that this was "by design". I.e. that if you work after the sun is set, it's bad for your natural sleep cycle for you to stare at a monitor screen which emits light that looks like the light coming from the sun.
By tying the emitted color from the screen to the rising and setting of the sun, your brain isn't affect by this any more. This doesn't mean that you have to go to bed when the sun sets and your monitor turns yellow - it just means that you increased your chances of feeling tired at a more natural point during the evening.
I'm a long time f.lux user and have happily accepted the yellow sun set on my monitor when the sun outside set. I've even worked long hours with this setting since it's a great ease on the eyes. If you ever worked at night with this setting for a couple of hours and then tried to switch of f.lux, you will feel your eye becoming VERY sore. Only then do you realize how uncomfortable the normal light from your monitor is.
When I had a problem with flux dimming my monitor too early, I just changed the intensity so it didn't get too orange. Just taking a little of the blue off still helps.
It might be placebo, but I've noticed a pretty dramatic drowsiness set in immediately following the f.lux "sunset." A lot of the time I will turn it off so I can stay up and get things done. If that's what one experiences at 5pm, I'd call that unusable.
Not dramatic - having your screen turn orange at 6pm is unusable. I'm going to work until 11 or 12pm. Let met set it so I start winding down an hour or two before I go to sleep. It does decrease the contrast of text, making it harder to read.
No, you just don't work until 11pm on them. You go to bed earlier, wake earlier, work on them at a different time, and have a more natural (i.e. solar-based) sleep cycle.
Having side projects and staying up too late do not need to be synonymous.
It's supposed to be tied to the time you turn your lights on (with their different color temp), not when you go to bed. But maybe some people use it differently?
It's not brightness, it is blue light. You are not suppose to turn blue off when it is time to go to bed. Blue light suppresses melatonin and it is important to start this early and not when your headed to bed.
Personally I hate artifical light and except for my kitchen my house is fairly dim. Work I just keep the lights off and have flu.x installed and dim my screen.
It also assumes you don't work in a well-light environment during the 3rd shift.
Regardless though, I think these shortcomings should be resolvable by simply setting your location in flux/redshift "incorrectly". So if you work the 3rd shift and use artificial lighting to give yourself an 'artificial day', then you'd just set flux/redshift to think that you are a continent or so over.
Not sure if you use flux, but you can set the colour temp for your daytime and your night time to match the kind of lights you are working under. They even mark certain temps like tungsten, fluoro, halogen etc ... So you don't have to assume anything.
I also use flux to match colour temperatures. It's pretty great!
My solution was to set the location to south of Hawaii. That gave me the best combination of bright during the day and not dark until 8pm or so. Setting my actual location was making it darken before 4pm.
The old flux was basically a sunset simulator. Complaints about it really have more to do with the solar system and your lat/long.
You could set it to an appropriate lat/long to produce desired behaviour... Then you could move there since the day cycle would be more to your tastes :)
I had the same issue, but I disagree with the "unusable" part - it definitely was very usable and I felt serious improvement in my sleep schedules. Yes, I had to postpone it regularly and I'm glad to try new version, but the old one was very useful too.
Huh, I had a different reaction - it was kicking in much too late, an hour after the light outside started to get dim in Victoria, so I changed the timezone to Calgary so it would start an hour earlier.
My solution was to continually disable it for an hour at a time until I had enough and uninstalled it. Happy to be able to try it out again.