Archive for the Personal Productivity Category

Nocturne, a nifty little application from the creator of Quicksilver, let’s you switch the display of your Mac into night vision mode:

This “night vision mode” is more than just a toy – there are situations when it comes in very handy! I like to use it in meetings and presentations where the light in the room are dimmed down. In those situations, the “night vision display” makes the display more comfortable for my eyes and reduces the annoyance of the bright laptop display for other people in the room.

The only drawback to Nocturne is that (to my knowledge) it doesn’t have an easy way to toggle between night vision and normal display with Quicksilver – so here is my solution:

Once Nocturne is set to “night vision” it will remember this setting and switch the display immediately when invoked. So all I needed was an application that would start Nocturne if it’s not running and quit Nocturne otherwise. A short apple script does this job for me:

tell application “System Events”
  if exists process “Nocturne” then
    try
      quit application “Nocturne”
    end try
  else
    try
      open application “Nocturne”
    end try
  end if
end tell

You can download this script here: toggleNocturne

That’s it. Save this script as an application and define a keyboard trigger in Quicksilver (I used Shift-Control-Command-N) to invoke it.