Be A More Productive Nightcrawler With Nocturne [Mac Only]

Working at night is great. The streets are quieter, I’m not drowned by disturbances and there is rarely anyone around to bother me. As it is so peaceful, I can normally go on working in front my computer endlessly, until I realize that the sun has risen and I’ve missed my night’s sleep. Has that ever happened to you?

You sit in front of your monitor and the light from the screen shines directly at you. Due to that, your brain doesn’t recognize that it is currently night-time so your sleep cycle is disrupted. One night’s work turns into a nightmare the following day - your energy level is low and your attention span is shortened.

One way to curb this issue is to constantly remind yourself that you’re working at night; and at some point, you’ll have to go to bed.

Nocturne is an application for Mac which sets it to “night mode”. It dims the screen, inverts the colours and sets it to monochrome. That way, you’ll have an impression that it is night-time on your computer and you’ve got to do what you’re doing quickly.

Switching the screen to monochrome doesn’t exactly makes everything dull but it does make it look less exciting. For me, it makes me sort of less interested in what I’m reading if I’m surfing, so I don’t sit in front of the computer as long.

It also reduces the amount of light which you are receiving so your brain knows that you’re actually working past your bed time. You’ll eventually feel sleepy and that’s when you know you’ve done enough work for the night.

Nocturne has got a couple more interesting features:

It can hide the desktop background so that your wallpaper won’t be inverted and monochrome, and replaces it with a simple black desktop. That adds more dark areas to your screen, making it less bright and obnoxious.

It can also add a tint to the screen (if black is not your thing). I find that adding a red tint converts my screen to a better colour and actually increases my productivity while still making me realize that I’m working in a low-light environment.

There were some refinements in the latest version of Nocturne which removes the drop shadows of application windows, which were apparently unpleasant when inverted because they seem to “glow”.

Development for this application is currently going on steadily. They are planning to add some features which users requested like:

• Adding a keyboard shortcut to turn on “night mode”
• Inverting only selected applications
• Automatically muting the sound in night mode
• Ability to automatically launch Nocturne then the display’s brightness is set to a particular level (personally, I think this is a very cool feature)

Nocturne is created from the makers of Quicksilver and is available for free on Mac OS X.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationships, studies and his future.

Filed Under: Cool Software Apps ¦ Mac
Tags: health, productivity, webmaster tools