App idea - night vision preservation

[rehingd]

Here's an idea for a 3rd party app. It would probably only be useful for about .01% of iPhone users, but it would certainly help me out.

When I use my iPhone in the dark, outdoors at night, or something similar, it's way too bright and destroys my ability to see in the dark for several minutes after.

My idea is for an app that will temporarily switch the iPhone display to be monochromatic red and reduce the brightness significantly. While it would be ideal for the whole interface to get the treatment, changing just the "slide to unlock" splashscreen would be a good start to allow checking the time.

Having to turn on the iPhone in regular mode to activate night mode would defeat the purpose, so perhaps it could be triggered by the vibrate switch, or simply by the ambient light sensor.

Anybody think such a thing is possible?

 

[philgilder]

there are several reasons where this could fail:
making the entire interface (or even the slide to unlock screen) red would be hard
i doubt the vibrate/ambient light sensor could do that

all i can think of is an application that could be written to do it, and using one of the hacks available that causes the home button double click to launch that application

 

[7on]

Auto-Brightness doesn't already work for you? Mine hasn't hurt my eyes yet.

 

[Drumjim85]

Also, I think only 1 app can run at a time, so if you have this running, you couldn't make a phone call, check email, or do anything else ....

maybe this has changed since they announced the SDK, but thats what I recall.
(no apps running in the background)

 

[philgilder]

Auto-Brightness doesn't already work for you? Mine hasn't hurt my eyes yet.

its not about hurting your eyes, its 'night vision' you develop as you are in darkness. full 'night vision' takes about 2-3 hours, and one look at a phone will destroy this 'night vision'
red lights dont affect it, so for a few people it could be useful

and also, i dont find auto brightness dims the screen enough at night

 

[rehingd]

My goal is in fact the night vision thing that philgilder described, not simply the display being too bright.

The closest approximation I have so far is changing the wallpaper to the apple-provided red rose (I obviously could add my own solid red image instead), setting the brightness to it's lowest setting, and enabling auto-dim. That does an ok job for simply checking the time on the splash screen (except for the white text, etc.). But the real inconvenience is having to set all of this up each time I'm going into the dark. If the iPhone was able to do themes like other phones that would help.

If anyone comes up with a way to switch the whole interface to "night mode" automatically, feel free to make millions off of the idea. Of course, considering the size of the potential customer base, maybe it would be more like make tens.