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Comment by 0n34n7 | Hacker News Reader

I'll stick with f.lux just because I'm growing tired of Apple stealing ideas for software features, instead of coming up with them.

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Since when does making a competitive software become an instance of 'stealing'?

Apple has, for decades, incorporated OS-level feature apps into its OS. This kills which ever third party developed that app. I don't necessarily think it's wrong at a technical nor market level - but it sure hurts that third party. Here's hoping some of them become employed at Apple or have the option to do so at some point...

But at the same time, I doubt flux really cares. By the nature of that project I think they probably prefer to see vendors 'doing the right thing'.

Apple forcibly prevented flux from working on iOS. [1]

It worked fine on my iPad 2. Apple killed it, and then withheld the feature from me until I brought a new iPad.

It would be like if they reached into your computer and locked the sound output to a certain volume, and told you to fix it by buying a new macbook.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2015/11/12/flux-iphone-sideloading-shut-...

“Apple has, for decades, incorporated OS-level feature apps into its OS”

As the lower layers get commodified, every OS vendor does that. Examples of features that, at one time, used to be third-party:

- graphics libraries

- font technologies

- audio synthesis

- MP3 encoding

- video playback

- text-to-speech

- speech-to-text

- TCP/IP support

- printer drivers

- antivirus

You can't even set up the hours you want f.lux to run. And the reason given by the developers is insane. Just for that I say good ridance.

Flux can do per-app disabling, which is very handy for movies and videogames. I suspect this feature is too conceptually complex to ever make it into Night Shift (although it could be possibly swung with good AppleScript support… which seems like a low priority to Apple these days)

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