As a student that has for years now feverishly clacked away assignments deep into the night, f.lux is my easily most precious app. No longer do I have to be bathed in eerie, bright blue light in the night; my poor eyes instead are rewarded a much needed reprieve with a soothing, orange glow that steadily grows with the fading day.
So what exactly does this do though? Surely dimming your screen has the same effect, right? Well, not exactly. While dimming any light source at night is certainly useful in combating the negative effects blue light has at night it still does not address the root of the problem — light luminosity. On this the American Medical Association’s Council on Science and Public Health had this to say…
[Our AMA] Recognizes that exposure to excessive light at night, including extended use of various electronic media, can disrupt sleep or exacerbate sleep disorders, especially in children and adolescents. This effect can be minimized by using dim red lighting in the nighttime bedroom environment.
There are multiple academic papers published on the subject of computer screens and their effect on users’ sleep cycles and they all agree on same principle; the blue-tinged lightbulb we’re gazing at deep into the night throws off our natural sleep cycle and makes falling asleep after use difficult. f.lux is a tool that helps combat this effect by toning down the blue to help ease your tired eyes and body into the night.
If you are not already using f.lux I implore you to give it a try. For best results I highly recommend launching it in the middle of the day and leaving it be, that way you get to experience the natural, steady transition it provides as the night advances.
When I was a child, I—like most American children in the late 1990’s—spent nearly all my car travel time engrossed in the world of Pokémon. The game cleverly leveraged the social pressures of competitive collecting utilized in the past for baseball cards with cute, digital monsters. Children were incentivized to trade with friends to obtain the bragging rights of collecting all 151 monsters which not only meant the game had a pervasive presence on the playground but also ensured that most of their free time would then be spent preparing for those trades by catching as many Pokémon as possible.
The actual process of trading in particular has remained curiously vivid in my mind after all these years. As far as I can confirm, the link cable used to connect the two Game Boys for the trade was my very first exposure to the concept of computer networking (albeit a very primitive implementation) and it scrambled my mind as a child. How on earth could it be possible to trade my digital monster companions using just a plain old cable? Despite the game’s best efforts to abstract this complication away enough to ease its young players into the concept I remained terrified by it in my confusion. I was just so sure that I would find some way to screw it up and lose my monster, or worse, corrupt my game save. In fact, if I had my way I would have forgone trading entirely to remain in my little, comfortable island of understanding where I felt I had control.
Of course, this was never really an option. Doing so would not only jeopardize my game’s progress but also cut me off socially from my peers. So I did what any child or adult does when forced into a situation they’re afraid of; I insisted on complete control of the process. My fear of the unknown had taken form in an absurd set of requirements that must be followed during set-up and that only their strict adherence would guarantee the safety of my game save and monster during the trade. I had rationalized with myself that syncing up the in-game trade character’s dialogue boxes on both Game Boys would somehow make them “see” each other more clearly and ensure a clear path of communication between them. It just seemed so natural to assume this cable connecting our Game Boys was a delicate, black magic ritual that I could easily break if I didn’t set some silly, arbitrary set of obsessive rules to prevent. They were stupid, yes, but they made me feel like I was in control, it made me feel just barely comfortable enough with the concept in play to do the trade.
I have no doubt this will prove humorous to most, but some of you may instead give pause and wonder why this sounds so strangely familiar…
What makes a great general-purpose photo does not necessarily make a great desktop background. Bright, busy photos — while they may be beautiful art pieces — are oftentimes a poor choice of background since they end up polluting your screen with a cacophony of overly stimulating visual noise. If all of your two million pixels are bright colors screaming for attention it takes a non-trivial amount of processing to work out which of those pixels you want to focus on and to retain that focus as you work. Take for example this desktop sporting one of OS X Maverick’s built-in backgrounds.
I'M SO GREEN! I'M SORRY ARE YOU TRYING TO FOCUS ON SOMETHING IMPORTANT?!
Yikes. I’d elaborate on what’s wrong with this background choice but I’m afraid you wouldn’t be able to read it over the neon green nightmare screaming above. Let’s pick something else…
Aaah, much better.
This background is a vast improvement. Not only is it a far more soothing tone of green it’s also far less visually busy. It succeeds at fading into the background and directing focus towards the task by subtly supporting and enhancing the foreground, exactly what any kind of background is supposed to accomplish. After all, it’s not a desktop foreground, it’s a desktop background, and it should stay true to what it is (unless you plan on dedicating your computer to being a $1000+ picture frame).
What’s the first thing you see when you use your iPhone? On a typical day you might wake your iPhone to a backlog of half a dozen or so notifications. Maybe you have three email notifications all of which aren’t important, perhaps one or two from a free game you stopped playing months ago frantic to let you know about a new 99₵ character skin, or occasionally a twitter notification that another of the hundred thousand spam accounts has followed you. If you are fortunate you may notice somewhere in that wall of noise is a text from a loved one or an important calendar reminder.
When you finish mentally parsing through the laundry list of unimportant notifications (or just ignore them out of exasperation) and finally unlock your iPhone you’re probably greeted by a sea of red notification bubbles. Which ones are actually meaningful to you again? You can’t remember. You think again that you really should just do whatever these apps want you to do so those obnoxious bubbles would all finally go away but the thought of going through them all (most of which you don’t care about) is more trouble than it’s worth so you ignore them instead to save yourself from further stress.
This is a day in the life of the typical iPhone user and this hostile, stressful environment it creates is entirely avoidable. It doesn’t have to be this way. Your lock and home screen can be a comforting place that knows what you care about like an old friend, let me show you how.
A friend of mine once told me software engineers shouldn’t do design.
I don’t believe that.
Design is a powerful and important tool available to everyone. Making it out to be this exclusive club that software engineers, writers, and other creators can’t and shouldn’t participate in is harmful and short-sighted. Good design serves a deeper purpose than simply fulfilling its functional purpose (i.e. how it works). It serves as a key communication channel to express to your audience that you genuinely care about them and the quality of your work. Creators have every reason to want to communicate this care and respect to their audience and I believe that this desire should be respected.
This website, in addition sharing writings and other creations that celebrate the humanity in computing, will serve as a live demonstration of this point. All designers, even accidental ones like me, have something special to share with the world. Here’s to the crazy ones, let’s get started.
