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I think you're underestimating just how much some people like dark mode; people have been clamoring for it for a long time. Be it for aesthetics, for power savi

by jml7c5 5y ago

I think you're underestimating just how much some people like dark mode; people have been clamoring for it for a long time. Be it for aesthetics, for power saving on OLED screens (a big factor that drove early per-app toggles on Android), and for comfort if light UIs are painful. Once it became a common system-wide option and developers didn't have to create inconsistent per-application toggles, it was a feature that users expected everywhere. 2016-08-08: Windows 10 Anniversary update includes system-wide dark mode option. 2018-06-04: W3C issue created for light/dark mode via CSS: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2735 https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2735 2018-09-24: MacOS 10.14 (Mojave) includes system-wide dark mode option. Safari tech preview adds the CSS media query `prefers-color-scheme`. 2019: All major browsers implement `prefers-color-scheme`. Et voilà, dark mode everywhere. Personally, I'm more interested in high-contrast modes. (Available in CSS via the experimental but widely implemented `prefers-contrast` media query. Web devs, support it today! Make life easier for those of us who struggle when forced to stray from good ol' #FFFFFF and #000000.)

guenthert 5y ago
Personally, I'm more interested in a night-vision mode, i.e. black (not contrast reducing grey) background and red/orange text. Chiefly for nightly outdoor activities, e.g. astronomy observations.
- jml7c5 5y ago
  I actually read most books like this! Red text on black background. It's especially nice in the evening: light above 580 nm doesn't appreciably activate ipRGCs, so melatonin sythesis isn't inhibited. And if the device had an OLED screen, its battery can last for days. I wish GPUs had programmable scanout "hooks", so that you could run a bit of hard-realtime code to modify colors as they went out. As it stands, you can either twiddle the colorspace knobs (limited control, can't do perceptual color->grayscale), or you can get the system compositor to run a color conversion pixel shader to modify the display buffer. The latter is infinitely customizeable, but eats into frame budget, bandwidth, and runs the risk of not finishing in time for scanout. (Now I'm wondering if something like this has been added to more recent GPUs, or if it's been there all along and I didn't realize it. Time to do some research.)

by jml7c5 5y ago

guenthert 5y ago

Personally, I'm more interested in a night-vision mode, i.e. black (not contrast reducing grey) background and red/orange text. Chiefly for nightly outdoor activities, e.g. astronomy observations.

jml7c5 5y ago
I actually read most books like this! Red text on black background. It's especially nice in the evening: light above 580 nm doesn't appreciably activate ipRGCs, so melatonin sythesis isn't inhibited. And if the device had an OLED screen, its battery can last for days. I wish GPUs had programmable scanout "hooks", so that you could run a bit of hard-realtime code to modify colors as they went out. As it stands, you can either twiddle the colorspace knobs (limited control, can't do perceptual color->grayscale), or you can get the system compositor to run a color conversion pixel shader to modify the display buffer. The latter is infinitely customizeable, but eats into frame budget, bandwidth, and runs the risk of not finishing in time for scanout. (Now I'm wondering if something like this has been added to more recent GPUs, or if it's been there all along and I didn't realize it. Time to do some research.)