f.lux – Your Mac in Sync with Nature

Your display’s color temperature is ordinarily designed to simulate the color temperature of bright daylight. This raises your serotonin levels and stimulates your physical activity. When using your computer during the daytime, this provides a healthy stimulus to keep you awake, but today many of us use our computers until late into the night. When we do so, the daytime-like light stimulus can interfere with our natural biorhythm and influence our sleeping habits in a negative way.

f.lux is a plugin for your mac that runs in the background and changes your screen‘s colors to warmer tones after sunset. This subtly helps your body calm down and prepare its bio-rhythm for a good night’s rest. The plugin itself is totally simple: Just select your preferred color temperature for day- and night-time, and allow using your current location so that the timer can automatically be adapted to the times of sunrise and sunset in your area. Once you’ve adjusted these settings, your screen‘s colors automatically dims after the sunset. If a situation arises in which you actually do want the full blast of brightness at night, you can easily pause or stop the dimming effect of f.lux.

I’ve been testing f.lux for several months now, and I really like its calming effect. When working in front of the computer until late at night, the warm screen colors really help to tire me down more naturally and allow me to get myself from work to sleepy mode in an instant. When considering the possibilites that for example f.lux or Philips‘ goLite have to offer, I see a whole range of intelligent and interconnected light environment solutions coming up in the future. Since many of us spend such a great amount or our lifetime facing a computer screen, f.lux already does a great job at supporting our physical wellbeing today. Thanks to the developers, you can download the mac os plugin for free here.