171–180 of 552 posts
"Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?" Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them. I would never read a white text on black paper newspaper, neither in the dark nor in th…
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I just change the brightness of the monitor twice a day.
...buried 2 or 3 menu layers deep, using a magic sequence of three buttons to handle all the up-down/left-right multi-level hierarchical menu navigation complexities. One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons. Every keyboard should replace their F-keys with brightness by default (seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate.) TV's should do this too.…
Apparently light-on-dark is terrible if the person has astigmatism: the edges get very blurry and doubled. There was an article on HN about this, specifically about keynote slides. Also apparently “in Europe and Asia, astigmatism affects between 30 and 60% of adults” (says Wikipedia). I have it too, and couldn't figure out in the past why text sometimes looks horribly blurry and sometimes doesn't. With this knowledge…
I like the solarized themes where it's not very light nor very dark but somewhere in between.
Surely the use of Dark Mode is purely on ascetic grounds.
Is anyone really justifying that choice by claiming it’s “easier to read”?
This reads like a massive straw man argument.
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Could you explain what you consider to be the difference between emitted and reflected light? I'm asking because in the models of global illumination that also handle emissive materials that I've worked with, there's literally no difference between whether a photon was emitted by a surface, or came from somewhere else and bounced off the surface. So I'm trying to understand if there's some fundamental property here (…
Emissive displays don't react to incident light in the same way as paper, even if they try. And they've been trying for a long time -- my grandmother had a TV from the 1970s with an ambient light sensor that would match the ambient color temperature.
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I’ll admit it’s not the best phrasing (and I’m definitely not an ophthalmologist, so I’m playing fast and loose here). Your pupils dilate to let in more light because there’s less light overall when the background is black. This causes your lens to distort slightly, thus making the edges of the white text appear to be fuzzy or bleed into surrounding characters. I couldn’t find a scientific source on this, but a coupl…
>[...] This causes your lens to distort slightly, thus making the edges of the white text appear to be fuzzy or bleed into surrounding characters The effect you're describing is correct, but the mechanism isn't. Aperture (pupil) size directly affects how focused the image is. The smaller the aperture, the sharper the image is. As an extreme example, if your aperture is a single point (a pinhole camera), the image can…
Diffraction limits the sharpness, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system. Pesky wave nature of light in action.
> Articles describing this seems to say it's caused by the film medium, rather than being an optical effect.
Halation in film is caused by reflection from the back of the film. Most of them have an anti-halation layer to reduce this effect. I don't see any reason why one's eye wouldn't also be vulnerable to this effect (and probably has some biological mechanism to prevent light from being reflected out of the eye. Cats sure don't have this, though.)
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Thank you. Everything else around this dicussion is pointless. If some people like light or dark mode thats up to them to choose. At least we're getting some choice back in our UIs.
I wouldn't agree with that. People may have made their choice based on incorrect research or incorrect assumptions: there is value in discussing the latest research. It's like saying discussions about whether cigarettes are good or bad for you are pointless, the important thing is that people are able to buy them if they want.
Your comparison to the cigarette discussion is an interesting point. The article didn't present anything particularly strong in regards to studies around this though so I'm unsure what there is to discuss, aside from speculation on whats good and bad for our eyes. If we're speculating I'd wager regular breaks and getting away from your screen as much as possible is far more impactful that which color scheme you choose.
My migraines and headaches from light sensitivity tell me you’re wrong
These articles are so bizarre to me: he's writing about dark mode and light mode as if you can just... _choose_ one or the other and be roughly equally happy either way? I would never even think to look at "studies" when it's blindingly obvious: light mode makes my eyes hurt a lot, dark mode is very comfortable. The only time I can even consider using light mode is mid-day with plenty of natural light around. At nigh…
Probably because dark mode has been shoved over us through an aggresive bro culture not unlike MongoDB at the time. That's probably why people want to be vocal about it (not as much as said bro culture still)