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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: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @02:13PM (11 children)
all in all, dark mode looks totally awful.
Some of them look good. Some look bad. But at least my monitor does not become a lightsource in the room I am in.
I usually can work longer with a black background and red text. I learned that trick from an astronomy club. You can literally see more. Also it does not strain your eyes as much as the blue wavelength does. After about 20 years of experimenting with it. It seems to work decently for me.
The white background came into vogue because of WYSIWYG. When was the last time you printed something? It has been nearly 2 years for me. If you still print a lot then white backgrounds sorta make sense. But for everything else? Not so much.
Now that said there are many dark modes out there that look like crap (especially the faux color ASCII vt100 term ones). But that is not the fault of dark mode. There are plenty of white backgrounds that look like crap too. I do not judge painting because I saw a 3 year old fingerpaint some garbage. Use your medium to its full extent and paint some happy trees. Pick good contrasting colors, pick something from black to dark grey for your background, pick a nice scalable font (not raster) .... done.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Saturday October 26 2019, @03:11PM (7 children)
0) Yes it is absolutely an opinion piece
1) VT100 for life (Admittedly I did just switch to Greyscale on SN a few minutes ago while reading this, but I've been on VT100 for a year? Years? I think they did an April fools with the site once and made the theme available afterwards, I'll probably switch to VT220 for a while actually.
2) Courier über alles
Also, as a reminder, two spaces after a period. That is all.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:06PM (5 children)
Eventually I will make a third version, with red.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday October 26 2019, @06:29PM
+1 Please do :-)
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Sunday October 27 2019, @01:29AM
Hmmm, it could work. https://i.stack.imgur.com/ortyD.png [imgur.com]
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27 2019, @04:53AM (2 children)
I used an Olivetti VT clone in ole lab at Univ of Washington back in the day.. it had an amber screen. So make an Amber mode too.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Sunday October 27 2019, @02:07PM (1 child)
VT220 is the amber mode. Check it out :-)
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Sunday October 27 2019, @02:08PM
Oh, you'll probably have to login. I remember something about it not being there if you were anon.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Sunday October 27 2019, @04:30AM
2a) DARK Courier, you insensitive clod!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @03:35PM (2 children)
Yes, how soon we forget. Although in this case the origins of black text on maximum white (rgb(255,255,255)) backgrounds arose about 25 years ago now, so many of the new crop of users just discovering this newfangled dark mode were not around to remember the days before WYSISYG created the bright white we have now.
For you youngins, the current bright white that is now being replaced by the "dark mode" fad was created so that the computer screen would look like it was a printed sheet of paper. Of course, the microsoft and apple idiots who dreamed it up failed to take into account that there was a significant difference between a sheet of paper reflecting room light at X lux, and a CRT phosphor screen flickering at 60Hz or 72Hz at max brightness also showing X lux. One was easy to read (the paper) one was an eye-strain inducing crap mess (the super bright flickering CRT). It was not until LCD monitors arrived that bright white backgrounds became reasonably tolerable, and even then only once the brightness was turned down enough that one was not looking directly into the sun while using them.
But, before the above, dark mode (or something less than "solar corona") was actually the norm.
Also, ever notice how fashion trends seem to go on a 25-30 year cycle....
It's been about 25-30 years since "fake paper" bright white mode, guess what, the fashion trend is just going back to what we had before.
Sadly, the new crop, who never even knew a time before "bright white" are screwing up their dark modes to the point that their dark modes are just as useless as the bright white modes they are pushing back against. Black background with 1 pixel wide strokes of white on fonts is just as unreadable as a bright white background with 1 pixel wide strokes of black on those same fonts.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Sunday October 27 2019, @03:13AM (1 child)
before wysiwyg white-mode all the editors I spent a lot of time in were trending from grey/white on black to grey / white / yellow text on blue backgrounds.
Wordperfect 6
Borland C++
Norton Commander
IIRC all had that color scheme as the default. I found it fine at the time, although lately there is this whole freakout about blue light so i find that interesting.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday October 27 2019, @05:45PM
People forget that early web browsers from both Microsoft and Netscape defaulted to a light grey background and you had to set the body background attribute to #ffffff to get a white background.
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