Ari’s Space*   est. 2026
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Warm the room, keep the grade honest

A personal reading-comfort tool, a colour-grading mistake, and the difference between removing an overlay and guaranteeing accurate colour.

8 parts / Hover to explore. Click to read.

A personal reading-comfort tool, a colour-grading mistake, and the difference between removing an overlay and guaranteeing accurate colour.

+------ Shade overlay --------+
| tinted surrounding windows  |
|   +---------------------+   |
|   | selected window     |   |
|   | Shade layer omitted |   |
|   +---------------------+   |
+-----------------------------+
Other display effects still apply.
The described Passthrough excludes a selected window from Shade's overlay. It does not cancel other display effects or establish calibrated colour, and Ari's reading-comfort experience is personal.
Context Pack (for agents)

Drive Shade_ over this whole page

This browser illustration adds tint and dim layers over the page. Passthrough excludes the swatch panel from those layers; it does not calibrate your display.

Passthrough window (outside this overlay)

With Passthrough on, this demo leaves the swatches uncovered. Turn it off to see the overlay affect them. Night Shift, your display profile and viewing conditions still apply.

Skin
Sky
Foliage
Red
Teal
Neutral

I am dyslexic. A white screen gets harder for me to read as the day goes on. A colour tint has helped me for years: a wash of warmth, or a particular hue, over the page. For me, the letters become easier to hold onto. People sometimes call that Irlen-style. This is my experience of reading comfort, not a claim that one tint works for everyone.

That was the first reason I built Shade_. I wanted the colour I found helpful across the windows on my Mac, without remembering to set it up for every page.

This is the June 2026 account of that design. The demo above illustrates the overlay in your browser; it does not install or test the macOS app.

A white screen at two in the morning

I work nights. At 2am a white editing timeline can feel like a floodlight. A little relief makes a difference when the session keeps going.

macOS Night Shift shifts display colours towards warmth. That can suit reading, but I also shoot, edit and grade. The image I am judging is on the same display.

02:00
        +------------+
        | WHITE PAGE |
        +-----+------+
             _|_
       o    _________
      /|---|  DESK   |
      /   |_________|
A late-night screen worker. An ASCII illustration of the problem.

When comfort changes a colour decision

The trap is overcompensation. You get used to a warm-looking screen, cool the image until it seems neutral, then open the export somewhere else and find it too blue.

I have done that. The work felt right while I was doing it, which made the result especially irritating. The image had been judged through a warmth I had stopped noticing.

WARM VIEW       YOUR CORRECTION       OTHER VIEW
[ warm cast ] -> [ cool the image ] -> [ too blue ]
An illustrative overcompensation path, not a measured before-and-after grade.

A comfort setting and a colour decision can pull in different directions. I wanted a way to keep my reading tint around the work while removing that particular tint from the windows where I was judging colour.

Passthrough: leave a window out

The described Passthrough feature cuts holes in Shade_'s overlay above chosen windows. Select the grading window, reference photo or site design. The rest of the screen can stay tinted and dimmed while that window is excluded.

The holes track the selected window's geometry as it moves or resizes. The design does not depend on lining up a fixed rectangle once and hoping the window stays there.

+------------------------------+
|      SHADE OVERLAY            |
|     +------------------+     |
|     | SELECTED WINDOW  |     |
|     | no Shade tint   |     |
|     +------------------+     |
+------------------------------+
Remove Shade_'s layer over the selected window. Other display effects still apply.

That boundary matters. Passthrough removes Shade_'s contribution. It does not cancel Night Shift, fix a display profile, change the room's light or guarantee calibrated colour. A window without this overlay can still be affected by the rest of the viewing setup.

The original essay called it a guaranteed-honest window. That claim was too broad. The useful feature is narrower: you can exclude colour work from a comfort layer you deliberately put around it.

What the overlay changes

The June design uses click-through overlay windows above the displays. Windows underneath remain interactive. The described overlay does not read their pixels, so that path was presented as not requiring Screen Recording permission. This is a description of that architecture, not a fresh audit of every app permission.

The original explanation also got source-over wrong. It described the operation as only adding light, unable to darken the image beneath it.

Source-over alpha compositing mixes the overlay with the background according to opacity. Over an opaque background, a translucent black overlay reduces the displayed colour values. The browser demo does exactly that with its dim control. It can darken the composite while leaving the underlying document or footage unchanged.

So the important distinction is between changing what the display shows and rewriting the source image. Shade_'s overlay can tint and dim the former. It is not a grading tool, a calibration system or a way to recover colours already altered by another display setting.

The demo lets you compare those layers. Hue chooses the tint; Strength changes its opacity; Dim adds a dark layer. The Passthrough sample sits outside this demo's overlay when enabled. Its swatch values stay the same, but your screen and other settings still determine how you see them.

The experiment that stayed behind a flag

The June account described a second engine that transformed captured pixels instead of placing an overlay above them. It reportedly worked in the lab, but remained dev-gated and off by default.

The problem was capture recursion: the transform could capture its own displayed result and feed it back into itself. That failure kept it out of the ordinary release path.

An overlay can already dim. The experimental engine was a different way to manipulate the captured image, not the first mechanism capable of making the rendered screen darker. At the time of this account, the overlay was the product and the transform was research.

Make comfort easy to keep using

The other features came from the same practical brief.

A schedule uses manual local time and can cross midnight. My evening does not reliably finish when the calendar day does.

Launch at login means I do not have to remember the tool before a long session. A comfort setting that is always waiting for another setup step soon gets ignored.

The free Hue overlay keeps the original reading use case central: choose a colour over the screen because that colour helps you read. It was the reason for the tool, not an extra feature added after the night-work story.

Why it was offered free

The June release account described Shade_ as free and open source, MIT licensed, signed and notarised. Those are the release claims from that account; this page does not supply a newly inspected application build.

I built it because I needed it. I wanted people who might find a tint helpful to be able to try it without paying to discover whether it suited them.

Warm the room. Keep the grade honest. The honest version of that brief means being clear about which layer the tool controls, and which parts of colour judgement remain yours.

//

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