iPad screen "Dimmer" in Cydia.

oh WOW.

i've been waiting for this for bloody ages.

This will save my eyes so much bother when reading in bed.

Nice!

WOW, I have been looking for something like this for the past two weeks! I can finally utilize my ipad at night, it used to be unbearable to my eyes. This post certainly made my day, thank you for the heads up on this hack!

I've been waiting for something like this since I bought my iPad on launch day, last year. Finally!!!

I was using Dimmer before I updated to 4.2.1 and miss it greatly.

I've been waiting for this ever since the iPad came out!!

I absolutely hate jailbreaking though But it's the one thing that I hate about my iPad. And the one thing I was considering upgrading to an iPad 2 for (as long as its brightness goes lower, there is no confirmation of that).

But this might totally negate my need to buy an iPad 2.

Before I jailbreak, could someone tell me a bit more how it works? Does it work based on the actual iOS brightness slider? And if so, does it even work for the quick-slider (the one you get by double tapping the home button). That would be absolutely brilliant.

If it's hidden somewhere deep in the settings menu it's a bit less interesting.

Does it actually dim the back lights or just modify the screen colors so it looks dim.

Icab mobile does it like that.

OSMac said:

Does it actually dim the back lights or just modify the screen colors so it looks dim.
Icab mobile does it like that.

Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure it does it like that, unless a firmware hack appears the actual backlight doesn't go lower. But I'd say the chances of that are slim. I think that Apple set the minimum brightness so high because LED backlights have a tendency to flicker at low settings and maybe the iPad was prone to that.

There are of course a few side-effects to the colour dimming method: It will reduce the available color range (since it's using only the darker colors for the whole range), it diminishes the contrast (for the same reason) and it won't provide any battery live improvement beyond what the lowest backlight setting provides.

But it will emit less light, and due to the high contrast of the iPad's IPS screen, it works pretty well (I haven't tried this app yet but I use iCab's dimming feature all the time).

Also, note that I've actually seen a lot of TFT monitors do this, once you dim them below a certain threshold you see them actually lowering the colour range. You can spot this by putting up a very detailed black to white horizontal gradient over the whole screen, you'll see horizontal lines appear at lower settings, due to the fact it doesn't have enough colours to show every step individually.

Anyway as long as this app will prevent headaches it will save the day for me, I don't care about the colour range when reading text, emails etc. Still very reluctant to jailbreak my iPad though

In the dimmer settings you can choose the threshold between where the stock backlight dims and where "dimmer" app starts to dim the the contrast. It doesn't actually extend the backlight range but it is 100% effective. I can use my ipad in a pitch dark room with no eye strain what so ever now.

buddda said:

It doesn't actually extend the backlight range but it is 100% effective. I can use my ipad in a pitch dark room with no eye strain what so ever now.

Click to expand...

this is really good news.

But can anybody say if 4.3 has better brightness control settings?

Thanks!

It dims the screen by adding a black background that fills the screen, and adjusts the opacity of that background depending on the brightness level you use.

So at absolutely lowest brightness via regular iPad settings, the black background is set to an opacity of 0 making it transparent, and the lower you slide that slider to the left, the more opaque it becomes.

This is why there is a warning on the package page that says "If the devices screen turns pitch black, press the powerbutton 4 times in fast succession."

This happens because the black background is set to 100%, but once the power button is pressed, it returns to 0 and you can see again.

I personally havent tried it, but I know how it works.

iMattcotv said:

This is why there is a warning on the package page that says "If the devices screen turns pitch black, press the powerbutton 4 times in fast succession."

Click to expand...

It's actually the volume-up button. But otherwise that's correct.

By the way, it does indeed work based on the built-in brightness slider, both under Settings and the one in the quick-access multitasking menu. So it's really easy to use. I jailbroke my iPad now and am very happy with it, despite the fact that I can't upgrade to 4.3 now due to the jailbreak.