Pro Tip: Use Your Mac Outside with Nocturne
Using your portable Mac outside during the day can be the most frustrating experience. Not only are you burning through battery life, with your display cranked to eleven, you’re left squinting to try and see anything other than black. Newer Mac laptops use LED backlighting which helps a bit but you can still be left squinting. A program normally used for night browsing called Nocturne will give you the ability to take your Mac outside during the day.
I am writing this article on my back porch at 5:40 p.m. just as the sun is starting to fall. The only shade I have is from an large table umbrella that barely shades my macbook. Without Nocturn this would not be possible.
Contrast is the key. Simply taking you Mac outside and turning the brightness all the way up will give you a dim desktop at best. Maybe in the future LCD screens will have dual modes including an E-ink function like that of Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle is very easy to read in direct sunlight but until we get dual purpose LCD’s the best thing we can do is fake it. This is where Nocturne comes into play.
Nocturne allows you to utilize a few hidden features within OSX turning your entire screen into either a black and white canvas or a few different tint colors of your choosing. By swapping from full color to monochrome your screen appears much more crisp in high sunlight conditions. You can do this without Nocturne by utilizing the shortcut Control-Option-Comman-8, however this simply inverts your screen.
The original purpose of Nocturne is to put less strain on your eyes while using your Mac in low light situations. I have fallen victim to a bright screen in a dark room and have since switched to Nocturne to stop those late night headaches. Within the preferences of Nocturne you can set your Mac to change the screen appearance based on the ambient light sensor1. I was unable to test this feature because my Macbook does not have ambient light sensors. Quickly changing to night mode is as easy as clicking the menu icon and then “Switch to Night”.
So here you can see how your Finder window will look like with the monochrome setting enabled. It’s a bit stark in normal lighting conditions but outside that contrast helps quite a bit. I was able to watch a video with this setting enabled without any apparent performance loss.
Overall I believe that Nocturne is a great tool to have in your menu bar when traveling with your Mac. Whether you are outside in the sun or on a night flight this nifty program can keep your eye strain to a minimum. Another great application from BlackTree, the makers of QuickSilver.
1 In order for Nocturne to utilize the ambient light sensor your Mac must have one embedded such as a Macbook Pro.
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This looks pretty cool. Thanks for the tip!
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