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from the you-don't-know-the-power-of-the-dark-mode dept.
Submitted via IRC for soylent_brown
The Dark Mode craze may do more harm than good – this is why
The hot new topic in terms of smartphone and computer software right now is Dark Mode, an optional system look that flips the colors of an app or operating system to make it, well, dark. Instagram has a dark mode, as does Chrome, WhatsApp, Gmail, and iOS 13, and it seems apps and developers are tripping over themselves to create a new dark mode for their software.
There's just one problem which none of these hard-working people seem to have considered that makes their work redundant, and the attention they've taken from other projects will be in vain: all in all, dark mode looks totally awful.
That's not a dig at any dark mode in particular, and no developers have implemented it particularly poorly (well, apart from Android 10). But in the rush for developers to see if they could implement dark mode on their apps, no-one asked if they should - and taken stock of how it might be reworked better rather than just following the trend.
Beyond that, there are legitimate reasons why developers shouldn't be focusing on Dark Mode. Here's why the Dark Mode craze is just crazy.
So dear soylentils, do you use dark mode on your applications, and why or why not?
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @12:59PM (3 children)
My eyes bleed (metaphorically, thankfully) whenever I have to read any text from a dark-themed website. I prefer good room lighting with light themes over that.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by doke on Saturday October 26 2019, @07:50PM
I have exactly the opposite problem. White backgrounds hurt my eyes. It was much worse back in the CRT days, the large white portions of the screen would "strobe" at me. LCDs were a blessing, because they didn't flicker.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:27AM
If by "bleed" you mean they hurt and you get a headache, you might actually be suffering from a mis-adjusted or cheap TN monitor. In order to get the color the display signal says should be shown, the colors on many panels like that have to be temporally dithered (AKA FRC) because the panels themselves only have 6 or 7 bits per color. Cheap monitors refresh rates are also lower, making the dithering more noticeable (sometimes as low as 30 Hz). In addition, the output colors are not spaced evenly, with them closer together near the brighter end. Finally, monitors display more static images, which makes the temporal dithering more noticeable because most of the screen is static. What you are left with can be very noticeable flicker on the mostly dark and static displays of dark-mode UIs. But, adjusting your dark level up, changing the output curve, or changing monitors, especially to an IPS one, can drastically improve the situation.
With darker UIs getting more common, I suspect more people will complain about the effects of temporal dithering. I've had to return 4 laptops and displays because they literally gave me a headache and made me nauseated. One Samsung Chromebook (after Google rolled out their new, darker, UI in 69) was so bad, I literally vomited followed by a full blown migraine with 3-hour pain phase after 3 minutes of usage and my spouse, who usually isn't affected by that kind of stuff, could only use it for 15 minutes at a time without getting a headache.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:24PM
Hercules and amber screens were the best.
Screens are not paper -we're not looking at reflected light. Screens are like shining a flashlight in your eyes and trying to pick out the dark spots of skinny fonts. No wonder people get eye strain.
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