Night Light window improvements

[LSLSLS]

You can navigate to the Night Light window/tab by going to System Settings > Display & Monitor > Night Light

1. The blue light filter makes the colors on the screen warmer.

What blue light filter? This phrasing comes across as presumptuous in that it assumes the user is already familiar with the blue light filter, let alone knows what a filter is.

Here’s some suggestions for what the introduction could sound like instead:

• The Night Light makes the colors on the screen warmer.
  This is the Night Light settings after all.
• Night Light makes the colors on the screen warmer.
  Do like The Facebook and drop the “The”.
• Night Light enables a filter that makes the colors on the screen warmer.
  If you want to be educational.
• Night Light enables a blue light filter that reduces the intensity of the color blue, resulting in a warmer color temperature which aids in practicing good sleep hygiene.
  Even more educational, but probably too wordy.

2. Switching times

What is being switched? Well, one of the options is Sunrise and sunset, so I’m guessing it’s when Night Light is being switched on and off.
But then we look at the other two options which are Always on and Always off. The switching time is always on? Meaning that it is constantly switching between day light and night light? Of course, that’s not what it does, but that’s what it says.

For a better understanding of what’s going on, I suggest making these changes:
Switching times Night Light activation
Sunrise and sunset Sunset
Always on Always activated
Always off Always deactivated

3. Day-Night Cycle

This is the window that pops out when you click the configuration button at the end of the Switching times row.

The graphic here is essentially the same as the one in the main window, although somewhat harder to grasp:

• In the Night Light tab, the graphic gives a good visual indicator of when the night light gets activated and for how long it lasts.
  The Day-Night Cycle graphic, on the other hand, simply lists the times for sunrise and sunset and lets you do the math. It’s even more useless if you’re using custom times because it’ll just show you the numbers you put in below which is clearly redundant.
• The Night Light graphic has a little gray triangle pointing downwards, showing the current time. It would be more appropriate if it pointed upwards as to show when the night light activation/deactivation takes place.
  The sun in the Day-Night Cycle graphic is analogous to the gray arrow, but is more difficult to decipher. It also doesn’t give any precise information about the time, but then again, you could just look in the bottom right of your screen if you wanted to know.

My request is that the Day-Night Cycle gets incorporated into the Night Light window by abolishing its graphic and moving the settings.
It would save the user some needless clicking and confusion.

4. Night Light graphic (continued) + Day/Night light temperature

In the graphic, there’s a sun for when the day light is active and a crescent moon with a light bulb for when the night light is active.
The sun and moon obviously represent day and night, respectively, but what’s the meaning of the bulb? Light? So moon + bulb = night light? Is this a rebus or something? Why isn’t there a bulb next to the sun as to represent day light?
It would be nice with some consistency here.

Which bring me to my next point:
The Day/Night light temperature sliders show Cool (no filter) at one end of the scale and Warm at the other.
For consistency’s sake, it could be something along the lines of:

• Cool (no filter) - Warm (filter on)

Or the mention of a filter could be dropped:

• Cool - Warm

Or if you want the user to be assured no changes are being made at the lowest setting:

• No change - Warmer

Or alternatively:

• Default - Warmer

[skyfishgoo]

linking this other night light brainstorm item for reference:

Change how night light handles extreme latitudes

KDE currently shows a “sunrise and sunset times cannot be determined at your location due to polar day” error when the device location is set to an extreme latitude during the summer time, which is perfectly fine. However, the result is that the night light feature then defaults to ON instead of OFF, which is counterintuitive because during polar day there is plenty of light out and night light is not needed. For reference, I live in interior Alaska at around 64.8 degrees North, which is high e…

i agree the clarity of the verbiage and controls could be better and could be easily included when adding a new feature, such as the one above.

my suggestions:

1. text blurb (no need to even mention blue light).
   “Night Light lowers display color temperature to reduce eye fatigue.”

2. main control (controls when Night Light is active)
   Activation schedule:
   -Always off
   -Sunset to Sunrise
   -Custom (this one went missing)
   -Always on

3. configure (for day-night settings)
   the separate settings window is because they are now shared with wallpaper settings so both can use them, but the configuration is lacking the custom times option, which needs to be reintroduced and enhanced per the brainstorm item above.

i agree the custom times should have a better layout by simply letting you adjust the times displayed at each end of the arc with the transition time adjustment in the center (all of on a single row), but we need to get it back first.

the bar graphic on the Night Light settings page uses the familiar icon to indicate when it will be active according to the day-night settings and location you have configured, i have no issue with using the icon and the warmer tone in the bar as it reads almost phonetically when you look at it

it’s a very intuitive info graphic, and kudos to the kde team for boiling down so well, and i think the current time indicator is perfect the way it is… there is a tool tip that gives the verbiage about when precisely things are happening with the night light.

4. temperature sliders
   in plasma 5 the (no filter) text was only visible when you move the slider all the way to the cool end to indicate zero processing of the color temperature.

plasma 6 seems to have dropped that feature and i think it should be restored… they also reversed the slider and put the higher color temperature on the left, which i disagree with from a physics point of view.

[pg-tips]

Maybe we should actually just talk about blue light rather than “warm”, “cool” or “temperature”.

The awkward thing about temperature is that:

• Everyday terminology: redder light is “warm”, bluer light is “cool”
• Physics: redder light has lower colour temperature, bluer light has higher colour temperature - the opposite of the everyday “warm” / “cool” terminology.

“Less blue light” seems more literal and less capable of misinterpretation.

[pg-tips]

@LSLSLS

What blue light filter? This phrasing comes across as presumptuous in that it assumes the user is already familiar with the blue light filter, let alone knows what a filter is.

I would also avoid “blue light filter”, for a slightly different reason - it could be misinterpreted as “filter that makes the image more blue”.

For example, result of a quick search for what “blue filter” means in everyday usage.

[skyfishgoo]

i agree the mixture of terms makes it difficult to be constant.

with my physics hat on i see color temperature in terms of physical temperature and 6500K is a lot “warmer” than 2700K.

so abandoning physics and going with the familiar light bulb analogy of warm vs cool allows for a more consistent and user friendly interface.

1. text blurb (no need to even mention blue light).
   “Night Light uses warmer colors to reduce eye fatigue in low light conditions.”

2. color sliders
   cool ———— warm
   suddenly i’m ok with this arrangement and would even be ok if they dropped the color temperature value at the end of the slider completely (it’s like an appendix at this point).

and instead of cool, the terms default or full would also be acceptable.

[medin]

For medium range laptops, Night Light was fast and excellent tool before 6.2, but since they forced some kind of [not needed] improvement of image quality, they killed its performance, for now it renders the whole desktop not usable at all, the more you use Plasma with it enabled the more it becomes slow.

[saatom]

For what it’s worth I also intuitively go with the physics interpretation of the color temperature descriptors. Perhaps the “warmer means redder” thing is regional?

Anyway, I’d support having a separate language or region setting for “layman American English” as opposed to “technical American English”. The former would use your proposed “intuitive” language but the latter would stick to the conventional temperature definition (and default to SI units, 24-hour time, A4 paper, and basically all other international standards but with American English text and currency).

[skyfishgoo]

as a demonstration for how confusing the color names can get, here is a sample of the bulb color options and associated color temps when searching on 1000bulbs.com for terms like

warm white

soft white

cool white

its a mess.

and for the record, i’m not in favor of dumbing down the UX for the lowest common denominator because this is where it leads.

i’m much more inclined to simply go with color temp language and be done with it… simply moving the slider then becomes educational.

[LSLSLS]

I’ve made this mock-up based on what has been discussed so far:

[skyfishgoo]

the custom time probably needs to be in the day-night settings page rather than here because of how the module is shared with wallpapers.

and the sliders should run from White ----- Red if we are sticking with color temp

[WildeGreen]

One of the points here in the original comment is a grievance I also have with a lot of operating systems. Quick-settings toggles for various functions are ambiguous when those functions are both schedulable and binary. For things like Dark Mode and Night Light, toggles should communicate whether they’re toggling the state of the thing itself (on=screen is yellowed, off=screen is white or black) or whether they’re toggling the state of a schedule itself (on=the screen will turn yellow at a given time). Rather than the on/off state indicating the schedule itself being on, i think that the switch should have an icon near it or embedded inside it indicating whether it will be scheduled (maybe an hourglass or a timer symbol, something of that nature). Sometimes I want to quickly turn off or change the schedule, not the function itself.

For example, maybe I usually use a schedule so I can automatically turn night light on at night. However, because of the way that switch is set up, I must manually override or disable that schedule in settings whenever I want to use night light as eye protection during the daytime. Essentially the switch is not a binary decision, when it should be.

[skyfishgoo]

in plasma 5 there was a system tray widget you could have that would simply toggle the feature on/off without changing any of its configuration.

i don’t know what happened to that widget for plasma 6… maybe it needs to come back.