EyeEase 0.2.3

What's new

• Paper contrast, a new switch in the options card. It lifts the bottom of the gamma ramp so black comes out dark grey instead of black. Warmth was only ever half of why a screen is harder on the eyes at night than a page — the other half is contrast. Ink on paper measures around 15:1, an LCD runs 1000:1 or more, and it's pure white sitting directly against pure black that stings.

  It composes with everything else rather than taking over: warmth still tints, brightness still dims, and "zero blue, zero flicker" still wins outright. White stays white — only the floor moves, because pulling the top down is what the brightness slider already does.

Also

• The colour maths and the sunrise/sunset schedule now have a test suite (python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -t .). It covers the failures that are quiet rather than loud: a ramp with a rounding error, a sunset computed an hour off, a coordinate whose hemisphere letter got dropped.
• The README no longer implies there's a Windows build to download. The code is written and the packaging spec is there, but none of it has run on a Windows machine yet, and the top of the page now says so.

Download

Notarized and stapled for macOS — installs without a Gatekeeper warning.

Upgrading from an earlier version: quit EyeEase from the tray first, replace the app in /Applications, then launch it again. Your settings are untouched.

v0.2.2: Bump to 0.2.2

What's new

• New "Check for updates" item in the tray menu. Only runs when clicked — never on launch, never automatically — so it doesn't compromise the app's no-network-calls design any more than asking for it does. Checks GitHub's latest release and opens the download page if a newer version exists.

Download

Notarized and stapled for macOS — installs without a Gatekeeper warning.

v0.2.1: Bump website version label to 0.2.1

What's new

• Fix a crash when opening the panel from the menu-bar icon. Tray clicks were calling into Tk from AppKit's own menu-tracking callback, corrupting the interpreter's thread state and aborting the process moments later. This was present in 0.2.0 as shipped.
• The app no longer shows a Dock icon or Cmd-Tab entry. LSUIElement in the bundle asked macOS for this from the start, but Tk's own startup code silently overrode it every time — now corrected after Tk's initialization finishes.

Upgrading from 0.1.0 or 0.2.0

Quit the running app from the menu bar first, then replace the old copy in Applications with this one.

Download

Notarized and stapled for macOS — installs without a Gatekeeper warning.

v0.2.0: Version 0.2.0

What's new

• Refuse to start a second copy of the app (singleton.py)
• Fix "launch at login" to correctly report which copy of the app it points at, instead of appearing on when it isn't wired up
• Fix a race in the release script's hardened-runtime check
• Site polish: favicon, hero icon, share card, corrected first-run note, thanks link
• Add the MIT licence the README already claimed

Download

Notarized and stapled for macOS — install without a Gatekeeper warning.

EyeEase 0.1.0

First release. A menu-bar app that warms your screen past where Night Shift stops, and holds the backlight steady so it cannot flicker while you dim.

Requires an Apple silicon Mac (M1 or later), macOS 11 or newer. This build is arm64 only — an Intel Mac will not open it.

Opening it the first time

This build is not signed with an Apple certificate, so macOS will say it cannot check the app for malware. That is about the missing signature, not about the app — the source is all here to read.

Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway. You only do this once.

What it does

• Zero blue, zero flicker — one switch. The blue channel is written as literal zeros rather than turned down, and the backlight is pinned to 100% so nothing strobes while the dimming happens in software.
• Two sliders and three presets — Reading (4000K), Evening (2700K), Sleep (1900K).
• Auto schedule — fixed hours, or real sunset and sunrise worked out on your machine from your coordinates.
• Never touches the network — no accounts, no analytics, no update checks. There is not a single network call in the source.

It lives in the menu bar. The icon is the lens colour while it is easing your screen and blue while it is not.