F.lux Review

So for those of you who don’t know nor have never heard of F.lux, it’s in my opinion one of the most useful, lightweight applications that I have ever used. It’s also freeware, and I’ve seen from the creator that there might be a paid version of something similar coming out with a ton of more features, but that hasn’t been 100% confirmed yet. So what does f.lux do? Well, I would show you a screenshot of it, but it wouldn’t matter, and let me explain why. F.lux is a program that warms up your screen’s colors and hues, to match the ambient lighting around you. It’s mainly used for night, but you can use it for the day as well, I currently have mine set to the afternoon sunlight setting during the day. The main focus around the application is to eliminate the blue color that your screen puts off, because during the day it is fine, but at night it hinders your body’s production of melatonin, which is what helps you get to sleep at night. That’s what f.lux was created for, to add an overlay of a specific type of hues to match your lighting in your home office or room, and to hinder the blue light that your screen produces to help your body keep producing natural melatonin, aiding in better sleep or to help you fall asleep easier. I first discovered F.lux when I was using Ubuntu linux, and ever since then I have it installed on every device possible that I have, my MacBook Air’s OS X and Windows partitions, my Windows laptop, and even my iPad and iPhone. It is cross-platform, and works on Linux, Windows (XP-8 I’m fairly sure), Mac OS X (10.4 Tiger up through the current 10.8 Mountain Lion), and even jailbroken iOS devices. They are working on an Android build of this as well, so you Android users don’t feel left out and in the cold, and even possibly Windows Phone 7 and above in the future. It has different settings, those being Candle, Tungsten, Halogen, Florescent and Daylight, with the bonus ability to set a custom lighting setting as well. I highly recommend that you go check it out. It takes some getting use to at first, as it does with everyone first trying it out. But if you’re like myself and a large amount of others, then you’ll soon not be able to live without it. You simply set up the program once after installing it, set it to open at login, and let it do it’s magic and run in the background, using about 3MB of RAM or less. Try it out for a week, see if you like it or not. It’s free, so why not?

http://justgetflux.com/