I do love my aesthetically-pleasing productivity apps. There’s a reason I fled from the bells & whistles of OmniFocus back to Things 3, and ditched Evernote for Bear at the earliest opportunity. They do less, but what they do do is far better.
There’s one thing that Things has over Bear right now, though, and that’s an auto-switching dark mode! I do a lot of my scheming and planning after dark, with my long-suffering Tam trying to sleep beside me. Since she’s already got the patience of several saints, it’s especially important that my pixels are pushing as few lumens as possible.
Fortunately, Bear has plenty of dark theme options, particularly if you pay for it. But who wants to be navigating settings menus to toggle a theme every time the sun goes down? (And yes, before you ask, I use light themes during the day. I’m a programmer by trade but not an animal.)
Shortcuts.app to the rescue! This extremely simple shortcut simply reads the current auto-brightness setting and toggles Bear between the light and dark variants of the default Charcoal theme based on a threshold.
Now I can launch Bear with the right theme for the light I’m in with Siri 🤩.
How it works is pretty basic, and easy to customise. The brightness setting is a fractional number between 0 and 1, with 1 being full brightness. I consider an auto-brightness setting of about 0.2 to be ‘dark enough’ for a dark theme. Your mileage might vary, so adjust the threshold as you prefer. And naturally, you might prefer any of the other great themes Bear Pro bundles in.
Shortcuts has some good stuff built in. For example, if you don’t trust your auto-brightness setting, you could simply use the Get Date shortcut and toggle the theme if it’s after 6pm. Or get fancy and hit a weather API for local sunset times.
I’m really quite enjoying this iOS automation hobby. Even though Shortcuts.app is a pretty terrible scripting environment once you get past trivial tasks. But that’s a post for another day.