Nocturne: Be Afraid of the Light

It’s night, you’re tired, sitting in a dark room, once again staring at your ultra-bright, white-light emitting computer monitor. This can be an excessively eye-straining experience leading to a lifetime of blurry vision. Fortunately, there’s Nocturne. No Nocturne won’t save your vision, but I found that it really does help when working long hours on bright backgrounds.

Nocturne is a new app from Blacktree, the creators of one of the best, and maybe the most legendary Mac apps of all time: Quicksilver. Now you could cmd+opt+ctrl+8, which will invert your screen’s colors, but Nocturne enables this with far more functionality. The app can do just that of course, but Nocturne offers the ability to make your display monochrome, or tint its color towards any that you choose. You might also like the ability to hide your desktop background, as well as adjust your window shadowing.

A slight warning - this can become extremely addictive, and may actually increase eye strain, or irregular perception as I like to call it. For instance you can tint it to red and feel like you’re captaining a submarine.

It turns out that screenshots don’t work with the overlaid effect. Anyways, here’s a bit of a preview made using Photoshop to give you an idea.

As with all of Blacktree’s offerings, Nocturne is available as a completely free download.