myPoint Shade

MPS would be a great app, best on the market, save for one thing. When it is running and my screens go to sleep, when they are reawakened they come up reluctantly and with a lot of blinking (this stops as soon as I quit MPS).

This morning I had a wierd effect: the main monitor on my 27-iMac refused to wake up, although the side monitors worked fine (menubar suddenly appeared on one side monitor). This happened for the first time after I installed MPS and left it running overnight. Took a reboot to get everything right. I can't officially blame MPS for this but this happened for the first time ever today and MPS was the most recent software intalled. So MPS lies under serious suspicion of destablizing my iMac's graphics (using a AMD Radeon R9 M290 graphics processor).

Developer: , I'd like to be able to use MPS but at the moment it seems too dangerous. Please look into this. I'll supply you with any information about my hardware/software that you need to know. Contact me at danasutton@mac.com

If you need a software solution to dim your screen, myPoint Shade is highly recommended. I cannot easily adjust the brightness on my NEC monitor as it's controlled through software, so I use myPoint Shade as a quick way to dim the screen at night. I like that I can use a simple hotkey to toggle it between dimmed and full brightness, and I can set it to automatically exclude certain apps that won't be dimmed (in my case, I exclude Lightroom and Photoshop, as I need to see the colours accurately in those apps). With the latest update (to version 1.17), the app now works the way I need it to. I had written the developer about a problem with a previous version where the shade would turn on when switching desktops if I had turned it off, the dev responded and now I can switch desktops with the shade on or off and it will stay that way. Excellent support!

While shading your screen works OK, the coloring is horrible. Instead of adjusting the gamma, myPoint Shade puts a colored layer over the screen of which you can adjust the opacity. This influences the contrast too, up to the extend the picture is badly visible. I hoped for 'live adjustment' of the gamma.