Apple's Night Shift mode arrives in latest macOS beta

[Jos]

Scientists say that staring at blue light emitted from displays at night can negatively affect a person’s circadian rhythm — that is, it can mess with your sleep patterns and keep you up late. Last year Apple added a feature called "Night Shift" to iOS designed to reduce the amount of blue light being projected, shifting colors to a warmer hue in the evenings that should allow our bodies to more naturally go to sleep. Now, the company is bringing the same feature to its laptops in its latest macOS update.

The feature is available now as part of the first public beta for macOS Sierra 10.12.4. Those who have signed up for Apple's beta testing program can download the new build now through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store — and those who haven’t but want to can simply sign up to participate.

Night Shift for Mac works in similar fashion to Night Shift on iPhone and iPads, users can set custom times for the display's colors to shift or toggle the effect on manually. A Toggle to turn Night Shift on is available in the Notification Center and you can also ask Siri to turn it on.

The night shift concept was first popularized by an app called F.lux which is currently available for Android, Windows, and Linux — it was formerly available for iOS and macOS before being removed from the App Store in mid-2016 for a supposedly unauthorized use of the iOS SDK and Xcode. Microsoft is also adding a blue light option in Windows 10 Creators Update, and a few Android handsets have the feature as well.

Other changes coming in the MacOS Sierra 10.12.4 beta include dictation support for the Shanghainese language, the ability to ask Siri for cricket scores, schedules, and player information, and updated PDFKit APIs to improve how supported apps display PDFs using PDFKit.

Image credit: 9to5Mac

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https://www.techspot.com/news/67938-apple-night-shift-mode-arrives-latest-macos-beta.html

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

So is Apples new Night Shift the new and improved version of their now archaic, yet still aggressively marketed Retina Display?

 

[Julio Franco]

Not at all, it's a color shift as produced by independent app Flux. Highly recommended:
https://www.techspot.com/downloads/5606-f-lux.html

 

[captaincranky]

Daylight is considered to be 5600 degrees Kelvin when related to the color balance of "daylight color photographic films.
PC manufacturers have developed some bizarre rationale for shipping monitors with color balances up to 9300 degrees Kelvin.

I have a (useless) degree in photography, but even still have been using lower color temperature settings for more than a decade.

Maybe instead of touting this as as the "next big thing", Apple might consent to marketing as, "correcting its own stupidity for making the standard color balance too blue in the first place" Like that would ever happen.

The first thing I do after obtaining a new monitor is to dial back the blue from the display, either by selecting a warmer (lower) color temp setting provided by many makers, or by balancing the temp warmer using using the individual color channel sliders, as provided other suppliers. Basically all that needs to be done is dial down the blue channel. Trying the get "warmer" by upping the red channel can result in muddy, unrealistic, excessively saturated color.

As far as the "Retina Display" (high count 300 ppi resolution), goes, it's pretty much something everybody is doing these days. I think they call it "4K". Thank god Apple can't patent resolution in pixels per inch, or we'd all be screwed.

(4K should have less PPI than "Retina", but the 300ppi of Retina is overkill anyway)

The question for modern handset owners becomes, "do you really need 1080p on a stinking 5" phone, when the resolution is the same as that on your 65" TV"?

 

[Kenrick]

Great feature and I would say a must have. Makes more pleasing to read or work in the dark.

flux is an alternative in windows. Its good Apple is integrating it to their products, much more stable than 3rd party solutions.

 

[captaincranky]

Great feature and I would say a must have. Makes more pleasing to read or work in the dark.

flux is an alternative in windows. Its good Apple is integrating it to their products, much more stable than 3rd party solutions.

But see, to a great degree, you don't need "software" to cure the issue. The firmware on board the monitors themselves is enough to rectify the issue.

If you want to run your monitor at 9300K, then sit up all night arguing in an online forum, it occurs to me, it's your own damned fault you can't sleep.