The minimum screen brightness level was sometimes still to bright to me, usually when reading or watching at night. I decided to build something that would allow me to dim the screen even more. I used to read about Swift basics few years ago but with a JavaScript, a language that I am using daily while coding.
- Used empty BrowserWindow with black opaque background (
rgba()). It works well across multiple workspaces but is rendered as separate app when opening a mission control. Also, mouse cursor is above the shade which can look odd but could be viewed as a feature, not a bug ;) - Native Menu does not allow custom content. I had to give up the slider input component in favor of increase/decrease menu items which was still bad because the menu was collapsing after every click. Adding 5 more to control opacity level was a UX rescue. I used 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 90% values.
- Shortcuts work only when the status bar menu is opened. It is not acceptable because setting opacity to 90% could make it difficult to turn off. It seems that the
acceleratorWorksWhenHiddenMenuItem option is not working as expected for tray-only applications. - At the moment, there is no preferences menu. My plan is to allow editing shortcuts and opacity levels + some functionality like open at startup etc.
Sizes below were calculated for the first prototype and are different from the current version of the app. Keeping just for reference.
I used Electron Forge to create a DMG file for the application. It supports different image formats and I was not able to find much information about them no the internet so I decided to try each of them to compare the output size.
None of them satisfies me, the lowest size is still horrendously big for a simple application like this one. However, I like numbers generated with ULFO format.
See the table below with format sizes ordered ascending.
| Format | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|
| UDBZ | 71.93MB | bzip2 compressed image (OS X 10.4+ only) |
| ULFO | 77.77MB | LZFSE compressed image |
| UDZO | 78.54MB | zlib-compressed image |
| UDCO | 96.13MB | ADC-compressed image |
| UDRO | 186.18MB | non-compressed read-only image |
| UDRW | 314.00MB | non-compressed read/write image |
Little amount information that I found about these formats: