Why I built Display Dimmer.
I started Display Dimmer because I couldn’t reliably dim one of the monitors in my own Windows setup. After trying a few popular brightness apps from the Microsoft Store, I ran into an unusual problem with my Samsung G5: the apps could read information from it, but attempts to change its brightness through DDC/CI made it disconnect and reconnect repeatedly. None of the apps I tried offered gamma-based software dimming as a fallback for that display. I didn’t mind how it was dimmed. I just wanted my secondary screen to be less bright.
I built Display Dimmer to detect those repeated reconnects, stop retrying hardware control and fall back to gamma-based software dimming. A couple of months into development, I discovered that adjusting brightness in the G5’s own menu could get DDC/CI responding again, as though it needed to be woken up first. A later firmware update fixed my monitor, but that experience gave the app a purpose beyond my own setup: helping people dim their screens even when hardware control was unreliable.
Turning that idea into a Windows desktop app was new to me. I had experience with HTML, CSS, Lua and Python, along with designing websites and graphical interfaces. The first version was rough: a couple of simple sliders made for my own setup. I began development in October 2025 and released it on the Microsoft Store the following month.
More than 20 people installed it on the first day, which was already more than I’d expected. About a week later, it reached 100 installs in a single day. I felt the app still needed work before it was ready for that many people, so I temporarily removed it from the Store, spent more time improving it, and released it again as version 2.0.
That response changed how I approached the app. I’d made it to solve a problem at my own desk, and now other people were relying on it. Updates often came just days apart, sometimes the very next day, as I worked on the interface, fixed bugs and added features I thought people would find useful. Testing also grew beyond my original setup, so I could understand how the app behaved on different displays and Windows systems.
