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Apple's Night Shift is coming to macOS

Apple's Night Shift is coming to macOS

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Before I'd ever heard of how LCD-originated blue light is slowly killing all of us maybe, I downloaded this weird little app for my Mac called F.lux, which pegged my screen's color temperature to the time of day. The result? Less eye strain, and a lot of orange-tinted Netflix. Then last year Apple added a feature called "Night Shift" to iOS, which mirrored this functionality, after shutting down a version of F.lux for iOS.

Well, now Apple’s Night Shift is coming to macOS. It just popped up in the latest 10.12.4 beta of Sierra, which is supposed to land alongside iOS 10.3. It's always a little sad to see an ingenious bit of software from a small upstart be copied by the Apple juggernaut ("Sherlocking," as it's called, due to Apple's notorious creation of Sherlock in response to an existing search product called Watson). Still, I eventually uninstalled F.lux because it was a little buggy, and I found living with a blue screen preferable to having my screen flash between orange and blue on occasion. So maybe I’ll actually use Apple’s implementation.

F.lux still exists for Android, Linux, and Windows (Microsoft is actually looking at including blue light reduction in Windows 10), so maybe it will live on. If not, at least it will be fondly remembered by me as the app that convinced me how horrible and life-sucking blue light really is.