Feature request: adjust screen brightness according to Night Shift schedule

[jonasvollmer]

First of all, thanks a lot for creating Shifty! It's so simple and smooth – great piece of software.

I wanted to make a suggestion that has been made a couple of years ago (#48, #68). I see you didn't want to focus on it then, but I thought you might still find this input helpful: There's some research suggesting that the screen brightness is more important than the color of the screen (because a bright screen with Night Shift enabled will still emit significant blue light), see, e.g., this. macOS's built-in "automatically adjust brightness" feature only works if the room you're sitting in becomes darker at night, and can be annoying during the day (personally, I basically just always want it at maximum brightness then). So it would be useful to have a feature that sets the brightness of all screens (incl. external Thunderbolt displays) to a certain level according to the Night Shift schedule.

I hope this gets implemented! Thanks again :)

[choco]

Hey, thanks for the kind words, I think everyone working on the project appreciates them.

Back to the issue, have you tried https://github.com/alin23/Lunar ? I think it should provide a lot of the functionality you're looking for and should complement Shifty nicely.

The main issues with this feature request is that: 1- There's no correct value at which we should set the brightness, everyone would want to specify the values they prefer, so that means providing some kind of brightness curve.... that adds a lot of complexity. 2- Dealing with external monitor brightness is not trivial.

Let me now if Lunar is good for your use case, I'll keep the issue open until then; but keep in mind, I don't feel we should include this in Shifty.

[thompsonate]

I just wrote up a whole thing about what would need to be done for this kind of feature and @choco comes in with what looks like a much better solution! I think ultimately, a menu bar app that controls Night Shift should focus on features that make controlling Night Shift easier.

Interested to hear if Lunar is the solution you're looking for.

[jonasvollmer]

Huh, I just tried Lunar, and I have to say: not a fan. It looks beautiful, but feels really complex to configure. I would like to tell it "dim from 10pm to 5am system time" but instead it forces me to specify the length of my noon, daylight extension, and provide the coordinates (longitude/latitude) of my current location. And it only works for external displays (or actually it doesn't in my case for some reason – not sure why).

1- There's no correct value at which we should set the brightness, everyone would want to specify the values they prefer, so that means providing some kind of brightness curve.... that adds a lot of complexity.

Instead of a curve, how about simply specifying two values (bright and dark)? That seems like it would reduce the complexity substantially.

2- Dealing with external monitor brightness is not trivial.

Without being an expert, to me it looks like it's fairly similar at least for Thunderbolt displays. The native macOS settings look essentially the same for both displays (internal and external).

I still think that Night Shift and screen brightness are very closely related, and several users seem to be looking for this sort of thing. But of course I understand your decision – it's quite a bit more complex.