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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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Productivity Freeware

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...
 

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Ely

To reiterate one of the earlier questions.....does this save battery life?

May 16 2007 at 11:37 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
sjmills

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).

May 10 2007 at 11:15 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Plugtwo

Night-vision for iSight!
http://www.ecamm.com/mac/iglasses

May 10 2007 at 3:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Paul

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.

May 10 2007 at 11:14 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David

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!

May 10 2007 at 8:26 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
matthew m. barnes

it would be cool to be able to set it to automatically switch nocturne on when the sun goes down every night. any thoughts?

May 10 2007 at 4:46 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
ciprol

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.

May 10 2007 at 4:21 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
south

excellent, i've finally achieved that 'first scene from The Matrix' look i've been searching for for so long.

May 10 2007 at 4:18 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
artifex

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.

May 10 2007 at 3:53 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ahmad

well, I'm red/green colorblind, so almost everything is monochrome to me anyway.

May 09 2007 at 11:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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