Nocturne Makes Night Mode More Useful
Working from home I often find myself writing code late into the night. It’s the quietest time around the office with no phones to answer, support emails to tend to and no kids running about. The downside is that working in the dim light of a desk lamp while staring at a blazing LSD screen can be a little hard on the eyes.
I was reminded yesterday of a little gem of an app, Nocturne, from QuickSilver creator, Alcor of Blacktree Software. I don’t know that I had ever used this one in the past seeing as it seemed a bit of a duplication of what was possible already in the Universal Access pref pane (white text on black). There is a difference, however, as I learned yesterday after downloading and installing it.
While the Universal Access route will just flip the colors into a perfect negative to what’s on screen, Nocuturne allows you to tweak a few of the colors and even offers some basic hue correction. This is important to me since I am fairly used to my syntax colors in TextMate and by using the hue correction in Nocturne I was able to maintain some familiarity with the code as I was used to seeing it.
I have since become reliant on Nucturne and have spent most of today working in night time mode.