What's new.

Sundown is a Mac menu bar app made by Jack Richards that warms and dims the display on a schedule you set. The 1.3 series shipped between 8 June and 1 July 2026, and it is where a lot of what people now take for granted arrived: brightness on the keyboard, Full Harmony, and most of the app's safety nets. This page goes through each release on the public update feed, in order.

1.3.0: brightness on your keys

Sundown started to respond to the F1 and F2 brightness keys, for smooth, flicker-free dimming straight from the keyboard. System logging also improved, to make problems quicker to track down.

1.3.1: Full Harmony

This release added Full Harmony, one toggle that manages Night Shift, ambient dimming and room light adaptation together. F1 and F2 began to glide with a sun icon on screen instead of stepping, and room adaptation got smarter, adjusting warmth more naturally to the lighting around you. A feedback field became always visible, and the glass effects and animations were refined.

1.3.3: steadier launches

If something went wrong on startup, Sundown now recovered automatically instead of silently quitting. Quitting the app returned F1 and F2 to normal straight away. And a watchdog was added to keep the sun icon in the menu bar even if macOS tries to hide it.

1.3.4: the brightness pop-up

Dragging the brightness pop-up gained snap guides, dashed alignment lines with haptic feedback, and the jitter while dragging went away. The pop-up also stopped disappearing when you disconnect an external display. Manage Subscription in Settings was fixed to open the right page, and claim emails started showing the Sundown app icon.

1.3.5 and 1.3.6: quieter when off

Version 1.3.5 stopped Sundown using the processor while it is turned off, fixed a rare crash shortly after opening, and made display subsystems fully stop when the app is off. Version 1.3.6 fixed brightness dropping when you open the lid, so you no longer had to toggle Sundown off and on, cleaned up logging so Console stays clear, and made keyboard brightness, dithering and ambient light features stop properly when Sundown is disabled.

1.3.7: safe mode

Sundown began watching its own performance and pausing, with a notification, if it saw unusual processor use. If it crashed on launch, it now opened in safe mode with all features off, so you could turn them back on one at a time. The brightness and temperature sliders also became easier to see on all Mac models.

1.3.8 to 1.3.10: brightness and the processor

Version 1.3.8 fixed high processor use by stopping the brightness indicator's animated border when it is hidden. Version 1.3.9 restored the brightness hold when you use Sundown's brightness keys, and let the watchdog freeze stuck animations as a last resort. Version 1.3.10 kept hardware brightness pinned while Sundown is active, even if it is changed from Control Center or by auto-brightness.

1.3.11 and 1.3.12: sharing and waking

Version 1.3.11 fixed the screen whiting out during screen sharing, so Zoom, QuickTime and other sharing apps were no longer affected. Version 1.3.12 stopped warmth flashing when the display wakes from sleep, by telling display wake apart from system wake.

The current build is on Sundown. For the reasoning behind flicker-free dimming, see Screen flicker and eye strain research.