Thursday, October 15, 2015

Quickly Dimming the iPhone Screen

Tim Stenovec (via Kirk McElhearn) and Justin Searls (via Josh Centers) show how you can set up your iPhone so that triple-clicking the Home button dims the screen. This seems to only change the brightness. It doesn’t change the color temperature like f.lux does. There is a limited way to do that in iOS via Settings ‣ General ‣ Accessibility ‣ Increase Contrast ‣ Reduce White Point, but I don’t know of a way to make a shortcut for that.

Update (2015-10-23): Dan Frakes wrote about this with iOS 8.

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Maybe not exactly dimming the screen but if it's a white background (like many websites) you can set the triple click to invert colours. Instant darker page.

The setting is actually in Settings ‣ General ‣ Accessibility ‣ Increase Contrast ‣ Reduce White Point. I almost gave up looking for it!

One downside to keep in mind when enabling this shortcut: When double-tapping the Home button to access the app switcher, there will be a longer delay before the switcher shows up, as iOS has to wait a bit to see if you will tap a third time. I ended up turning off the triple-tap shortcut because I use the app switcher much more often than I need to darken the screen.

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