Tranquility
Night vision for programmers. Work well in the dark. For OSX 10.9.
- Download available at https://github.com/lswank/Tranquility/releases/latest
Orginally Created by Nicholas Jitkoff as Nocturne, and distributed through https://code.google.com/p/blacktree-nocturne. I fell in love with this program when someone was using it at WWDC a few years ago. I was sad to discover that OSX 10.9 broke it and that Nicholas was no longer maintaining it.
I am hoping that a new name and an update to make it run will breathe new life into it.
Frequently Answered Questions
Help! My Mac says Unknown Developer! I can't run the application!
Do a web search for "disable gatekeeper on osx" and you can find out how to free your Mac from Apple-imposed limitations on what programs you can run.
Is my menu bar supposed to flash red like this when the application starts?
Only if "Menu bar: Dim when inactive" is checked. This is a known issue.
Mission Control's desktops and full-screen apps appear to be broken in night mode.
Yes, they do, if you hide the desktop. The current workaround is to not hide the desktop while we figure out how to solve the issue. :)
Is this different than CTRL + ALT + CMD + 8 to invert colors?
Yes. Simply inverting colors can leave you with some very high-intensity colors that aren't exact easy on the eyes. Tranquility uses a greyscale gradient, and allowed extra things like disabling the window dropshadows which end up being bright white in 'invert colors' mode.
Does this use private/undocumented APIs?
Yes. You won't find it in the Mac App Store. And it may break it Apple changes major things between OS revisions. The best thing you can to do prevent this from happening is to make sure all of your friends who work at Apple HQ learn to love it. Then they'll resist the urge to break it unintentionally.
What happened to the original dev?
I think he got hired by Google because of his work on Quicksilver.
Why isn't it working? I am using Flux.
Please do not run Flux (http://justgetflux.com/) at the same time. They conflict because they are (likely) modifying the same system properties. Also, if any Flux devs want to help us out by sharing what they're doing internally, that would be awesome!
Does this work on 13C48?
According to Reddit user font9a, yes it "works on 13C48".
How is this different from Shades?
Shades is a nifty little program that changes the brightness of the screen. It has a strict subset of the features of Tranquility. If all you want is a little bit more fine-grained control over the brightness slider, Shades is the way to go. If you want to change the colors at all, however, Tranquility is here for you. Of course, the middle ground between your keyboard brightness controls and Shades is the Shift+Option+BrightnessKeys trick. ;)