Filed under: Productivity, Freeware
Nocturne: "night vision mode" for your Mac
When Nicholas Jitkoff (of Quicksilver fame) pops up on twitter and announces a new app, it's probably worth a look. In this case it's called Nocturne and is a simple program to put your Mac in "night vision mode." The main thing it does is invert the colors on your screen (which you can accomplish natively just by hitting cmd-opt-cntl-8), but it also has options for making the display monochrome and tinting it (the default is a kind of sepia) as well as suppressing your Desktop picture and window shadows. I think the idea is simply that white on black is easier to read at night.Nocturne is a free download from Blacktree.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Aaron Gyes said 7:27PM on 5-09-2007
Easier to read? I don't think the time of day is going to make any difference with readability. More likely this is for creating less light. Useful if you're into astronomy and don't want to blast away your eyes, or use your machine around others indoors at night that don't want the room lit up.
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Johnny Malkavian said 7:39PM on 5-09-2007
Doesn't Black Light already do that?
http://www.michelf.com/projects/black-light/
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Slaptijack said 7:42PM on 5-09-2007
Aaron's right, this might not be the best for reading in low light, but it looks a lot better than the default cmd-opt-ctl-8 version.
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Everyday Weekender said 8:35PM on 5-09-2007
that's very nice.. wa wa wee wa!
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drg said 9:24PM on 5-09-2007
Actually, often times I run into sites, especially forums, that have adopted strange color schemes with light text on dark -- makes it impossible to stay focus. And doing a direct invert, Apple's way, reverses the values perhaps but inverts colors -- then I'd have to go to Preferences, check Grayscale, etc. This way, the monochrome is already ready. Handy.
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trainwrecka said 9:25PM on 5-09-2007
i'm in nocturne right now ---- me likey!
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Alex P. said 9:58PM on 5-09-2007
I like to pretend i'm on red alert on a submarine by putting my screen tint to red.
WEEEE
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Dave said 11:19PM on 5-09-2007
If this isn't the answer to the White/Black Google question I don't know what is. I didn't know about the inverse colors, thanks TUAW! Loving it. Much easier on the eyes. The monochrome is nice too.
Will this actually save battery power on a laptop? Or no because the bulbs behind the LCD are still fired up? Either way - thanks.
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Ahmad said 11:34PM on 5-09-2007
well, I'm red/green colorblind, so almost everything is monochrome to me anyway.
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artifex said 3:53AM on 5-10-2007
For astronomy, you don't really want any other color than red. You don't want white, that's for sure. And you especially don't want it at a dark site with other astronomers. They'll beat you with their equatorial mounts. :)
Well, probably not, but it's excessively rude, especially if others are doing astrophotography.
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south said 4:19AM on 5-10-2007
excellent, i've finally achieved that 'first scene from The Matrix' look i've been searching for for so long.
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Ciprol said 4:22AM on 5-10-2007
This is fine for use during night time flights where you don't want to keep the people around you awake. But the irony is, a dark screen uses more power, so it's not ideal for battery conservation.
Otherwise, I've been using DarkAdaptedX for a long time. It has a lot more truly useful settings.
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David said 8:27AM on 5-10-2007
I am currently trying to revise like mad for my exams coming up and I have just installed this app and set my text to yellow with everything else black and it really helps me to focus just on the text I am trying to read/write.
I set the text to yellow because apparently it helps you to retain the information better - even if this comes to do placebo then I am happy about that!
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matthew m. barnes said 10:36AM on 5-10-2007
it would be cool to be able to set it to automatically switch nocturne on when the sun goes down every night. any thoughts?
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Paul said 11:14AM on 5-10-2007
My mac seems to do this already. I have 10.3.9, but I also have quicksilver installed. Not sure if that is why it does it. It switches to the inverse colours then a few ms later it goes completely gray-scale.
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Plugtwo said 3:43PM on 5-10-2007
Night-vision for iSight!
http://www.ecamm.com/mac/iglasses
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sjmills said 11:15PM on 5-10-2007
Of course I had to try it to see what it looked like to actually tint the monochrome inversion instead of the standard screen inversion. One thing I noticed is that text didn't look as good when I first switched Nacturne on. It could be because subpixel antialiasing only works when the image will be displayed as it thinks it should be (white is white, black is black ("I want my baby back")).
I also find white text on black annoying to read at any length. It burns horizontal lines into the retina, which are really annoying when you look at something lighter (a normal black-on-white window, a piece of paper, etc).
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Ely said 11:39AM on 5-16-2007
To reiterate one of the earlier questions.....does this save battery life?
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