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Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

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Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#291

Post by CathedralBorrow »

dkersten wrote: post #277
Veen wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can a study tell me what is comfortable for me? Unless you are an emigre from Betelgeuse or a particularly intelligent octopus, you have eyes that work in the same way as everyone else's eyes. The biology and physiology of the human eye are well understood. Chocolate is an excellent comparison. Whether you like chocolate is a matter of taste. But you don't get to claim that eating chocolate for breakfast, lunch…

Despite that most of our bodies function more or less the same way, everybody has completely different tastes and preferences in many different things.

And when you add the human brain into any process you now have something much more complex and much less understood, with much more room for say, personal differences.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#292

Post by taneq »

yiyus wrote: post #254
marcus_holmes wrote: post #241

Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyebal…

Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments.

> point the errors you find

All of those studies are studies of how other people experienced dark mode vs. normal mode.

All of my studies are studies of how I experience dark mode vs. normal mode.

I feel that my sample more closely aligns to the population I'm trying to study.

Also it mentions spectrum-shifting software like 'night light' or f.lux or whatever Android and Windows call it when they do this by default.

And the thing about dark-on-white being more visible than white-on-dark is just blatantly wrong and the military anecdote makes no sense, camo against dark background in the dark is going to be low contrast because the camo you wear in the dark is dark, muted colours.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#293

Post by enay »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #196
qwerty456127 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to have a good e-paper laptop for coding, reading and communicating. I actually consider today (and even 5-yr-old) e-paper displays perfectly usable for all real tasks except watching video and playing realtime games. Compilers and editors (and web pages) should change to avoid unnecessary output and require less screen updates though (this would actually be great anyway - whatever kind of screen I have…

I've seen a couple who hacked together setups using Android e-ink tablets, but I'd love to see someone make (and sell) a product with a little more polish. The main barrier is that almost all modern GUIs depend on high refresh rates, but it's not hard to imagine a GUI designed from the ground-up for ePaper. Little-to-no transitions, pagination instead of scrolling, maybe a customized version of Firefox with a promine…

I wouldn't be surprised if the e-ink display market exploded in the near future with Dasung getting the refresh rate into usable territory and the availability of color e-ink. I been trying a couple of things to help with eye fatigue and the following helped me quite a bit: setting up "Breaks For Eyes" for osx to remind about taking breaks, switching to the light "Brutalist" theme for emacs and moving most of my longform reading to a Boox e-ink tablet, though I wish the Android Pocket app would support pagination and there was a good Reader-mode-by-default browser.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#294

Post by kijin »

cnity wrote: post #214
aasasd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emitted light isn't a problem per se, because reflected photons aren't somehow radically different from emitted ones. Color and brightness profile is the problem. On a display, you have to have high contrast and brightness for images (that have lots of darker areas), so the system interface is in turn tuned for this high brightness—and then you have to deal with bright white under text. Note how text on e-ink is exce…

These are good points but miss an essential part of the story: reflected light almost by definition matches the brightness of the surrounding environment, meaning that the periphery is roughly the same brightness and white balance as the reading medium. If I look at my laptop on full brightness in a nearly pitch black room, it is far less comfortable to read than if I turned on a lamp. So there are two solutions to t…

Every time I bought a new computer monitor in the last 10+ years, I had to turn the brightness way down in order to use it comfortably. I've gone as far down as 8% with some of the brightest monitors, and even with more reasonable ones I rarely go above 40%. Maybe these things are designed to be readable outdoors in direct sunlight. They're absolutely not suitable for indoors use, especially at night.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#295

Post by artistsvoid »

I switched after years of dark mode as well, just a few days ago. The initial reason that it is very hard to get a consistent nice dark-mode experience across applications; think for example pdfs (which look ugly w/ inverted colors), or screen flickering during load times of programs, non optimized websites, video content, et cetera.

solarized light, redshift and just turn screen brightness down and it actually still looks ugly to me, but regarding eye strain, having proper syntax highlighting, and being less annoyed about the things mentioned above, it is fine and I might stick to this setup; once you are focusing you don't notice the ugliness.

https://i.imgur.com/xakys4y.png

reminded me of ACME, so I guess rob was just spot on way back https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Acme.png

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#296

Post by dlkinney »

yiyus wrote: post #254
marcus_holmes wrote: post #241

Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyebal…

Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments.

The study referenced by his reference is not very good.[1]

They use full white and full black for all modes. As we know, dark theme is typically white on dark gray (or equivalent), not pure white on pure black. I can't think of any dark mode that uses pure black. (AOSP, IOS, macOS, etc.)

This alone invalidates the study, because it doesn't reflect the real world. Science is only as good as it is rigorous, and if it fails to model the real world, then it's not very good.

Science, these days, seems to have become a faith based system, because most people don't usually review the content of the studies.

That (and bad science, like this study) is a shame.

1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001872081351550...

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#297

Post by kijin »

skywhopper wrote: post #238
coldtea wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Photos are still photons. You can adjust the brightness of the monitor to be the same of a newspaper that reflects you…

But, you often can’t turn down the brightness that much. And anyway the contrast of monitors is many times worse than the contrast of a printed newspaper. Photons are photons, but a screen sends very different pattern of photons to your eyes than a newspaper.

Then you need to get a better monitor. Some of the cheaper ones out there are insanely bright just so they can put larger numbers in the brightness and contrast columns. Good panels have decent contrast even when you turn down the brightness.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#298

Post by mdwrigh2 »

lkesteloot wrote: post #19

"Unless you’re using an OLED or AMOLED screen and your dark mode is truly black – not dark grey, not dark blue, BLACK. There is no difference in power consumption." I thought this was a myth. I looked into it last year and found that power consumption was (roughly) proportional to brightness. At a meta-level, I'm surprised that something with so factual (and testable) an answer can still not be settled.

> At a meta-level, I'm surprised that something with so factual (and testable) an answer can still not be settled.

It is absolutely settled, and has been tested over and over again. Power is roughly proportional to the amount of light emitted[1], so having dark grey is absolutely a power savings over pure white.

Google slides: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/8/18076502/google-dark-mode... Display energy modeling: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1002/stvr.1635

[1]: This isn't totally true mostly because the display is broken into RGB elements emitting light of differing efficiencies and human perception of the brightness of those elements is not identical.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#299

Post by Razengan »

Is giving people options such a good idea?

I wish I, as a lazy developer, had to do the least amount of work to make the most amount of users use my software, the quality of their experience be darned.

Electron gets me through most of the way. For the rest I have to write articles to convince people about the unnecessity of anything that makes me do extra work.

If someone could write a tool to automate such articles that would be great.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#300

Post by kd0amg »

Many people perceive light mode as the cause of eye strain. But blue light, among other things, is actually the cause of it most of the time.

That seems like an explanation of why to prefer dark mode over light mode when those are the choices available. Or are app/web developers making dark mode versions that actually use bright blue light?

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