TIP! Save your eyeballs

Looking at a brightly lit screen in the dark is murder on the ol’ retinas. We’ve changed our ways ever since Jeff Kelley sent in this TIP!

April 2, 2015; 7:00 AM • by Ross Catrow

This tip comes from TIP!STER Jeff Kelley. I totally agree with everything he says, but think he downplays the benefit saving your own eyeballs can have on the person sleeping next to you in bed. Nothing incites a slumbering partner to seething anger quicker than shining an iOS device, bright as the surface of the sun, into their faces.

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Looking at your phone in the dark can cause eye strain and can hurt your brain or probably even lead to blindness, maybe, who knows. Point being, looking at your iPhone in the dark is equivalent to shining a flashlight into your retinas, and it’s not healthy.

So, stare at your iPhone or iPad and ignore that loving partner laying next to you in a more healthful manner. This tip will turn your white iPhone backgrounds black. It will also make people look like zombies in pictures as the trick essentially turns everything into a photo negative, but it’s a swift action to flip back and forth.

Tap your way to Settings > General > Accessibility > Scroll alllll the way to the bottom of that page to Accessibility Shortcut. Now tap Invert Colors. Open, say, a news article or your texts, then triple-click your home button. Boom! Eye comfort. Click the home button three times to revert.

There is probably also a way to do this on a Droid phone, but that’s on you, Droid owners.¹

Kindles have a nighttime setting that reverses the text in an e-book. Unfortunately, it does not have an alarm that goes off when you are about to fall asleep and let the thing fall onto your face, possibly breaking your nose. ↩