Not So Bright

Hello, throng. I thought I’d kick off this journal with a few older, tiny projects that I never properly released. This includes today’s entry: “Not So Bright.”

A college roommate had the terrible habit of sleeping at night. Many Apple LCDs – mine included – cannot dim lower than 30% brightness. My roommate’s addiction demanded that I either a) reduce the glow of my screen below 30% at night or b) inconvenience myself by removing/disabling the machine while he slept. Obviously, I chose the technical solution.

Not So Bright cuts your screen’s overall glow by darkening every pixel. This behaves much like having a dimmer backlight. To use it, fully dim your screen’s backlight the normal way (F1 or a monitor button), open Not So Bright, and use its slider control to set the level of additional dimming. 

Download Not So Bright (36KB, Mac OS X Universal Binary)

Notes:

  • Even at 100% brightness, your color calibration may slightly change while Not So Bright is running. All changes will be reverted when it quits.
  • If you have multiple monitors, Not So Bright will only dim your primary monitor.
  • To the technical among you- all real magic is handled by the CoreGraphics method “CGSetDisplayTransferByFormula”.
Update: I found a few similar apps by other people: Brightness Control, DarkAdapted, ScreenShade, Shades. Brightness Control is the most similar. Every one of these apps is far more complex than Not So Bright - the smallest among them is several times larger on disk - but they do have features that some people need (multiple monitor support, background processes, manipulating color channels independently). So here’s Not So Bright’s niche: tiny, elegant, 0% CPU usage, sexy icon.