About Sundown
Sundown is a Mac menu-bar app that drives your display far warmer and dimmer than Apple's built-in settings allow. Night Shift's warmest setting is roughly 2700K; Sundown goes to 500K — deep, candlelight red — on a schedule tied to sunset and sunrise. Six presets from Flow to Biohacker, gamma-curve dimming for extra depth without added flicker, and a science page citing the primary research. Native Swift with no Electron runtime — a ~6 MB download — and no account required. macOS 14+.
Your Mac ships calibrated for noon. Sundown is a menu-bar app that fixes that for the hours after sunset: it drives the display far warmer and dimmer than Apple's built-in controls allow. Night Shift's warmest setting sits around 2700K — the colour of an ordinary light bulb, still heavy in the blue wavelengths that signal "daytime" to the body clock. Sundown goes an order of magnitude deeper, down to 500K, a deep candlelight red.
Warmth and brightness run on a sunset-to-sunrise schedule or fully manual control, with six presets — Flow, Reading, Evening, Deep Sleep, Biohacker, Custom — and an intensity range that goes well past anything in System Settings. Brightness dimming works by pulling the gamma curve down rather than leaning on the backlight, so the screen can go darker at night without adding flicker. Media keys keep working, and a smooth ramp engine makes every transition glide.
The science behind display colour temperature and melatonin is real, and Sundown cites it rather than summarising it: the science page at trysundown.com/science walks through 14 primary PubMed papers, including the randomised-trial evidence, and is deliberately honest about what the research does and does not show — it cites the 2023 Cochrane review, the strongest paper against blue-light claims, alongside the supportive work.
Sundown is native Swift (no Electron, a ~6 MB download), requires no account, and is actively maintained with regular releases — in a category where the best-known tools have gone years without a Mac update; f.lux's shipping Mac binary is dated May 2023. macOS 14 or later, universal for Apple Silicon and Intel. Version 1.4.10. $4.99/month, $39/year or $79 lifetime, with a 7-day free trial.
Warmth and brightness run on a sunset-to-sunrise schedule or fully manual control, with six presets — Flow, Reading, Evening, Deep Sleep, Biohacker, Custom — and an intensity range that goes well past anything in System Settings. Brightness dimming works by pulling the gamma curve down rather than leaning on the backlight, so the screen can go darker at night without adding flicker. Media keys keep working, and a smooth ramp engine makes every transition glide.
The science behind display colour temperature and melatonin is real, and Sundown cites it rather than summarising it: the science page at trysundown.com/science walks through 14 primary PubMed papers, including the randomised-trial evidence, and is deliberately honest about what the research does and does not show — it cites the 2023 Cochrane review, the strongest paper against blue-light claims, alongside the supportive work.
Sundown is native Swift (no Electron, a ~6 MB download), requires no account, and is actively maintained with regular releases — in a category where the best-known tools have gone years without a Mac update; f.lux's shipping Mac binary is dated May 2023. macOS 14 or later, universal for Apple Silicon and Intel. Version 1.4.10. $4.99/month, $39/year or $79 lifetime, with a 7-day free trial.
