As someone who looks at Xcode all day, I'm very happy to be getting a dark mode. But really I have my fingers crossed the syntax highlighting issues get fixed.
In the last five years or so, there has been a push in pro-level apps to include a dark mode.
While some may understand this change as an aesthetic choice, it's also an assistive technology, one that mitigates the visual fatigue that comes from staring into a screen for upwards of 10 hours per day.
It is a welcome change for professionals to have dark mode (visually assistive) interfaces and I wish that web sites would also make this shift or, at least, add the option.
By way of explanation, if one spends a lot of time reading the web or interacting with the file system (macOS, I'm looking at you) the computer display is blaring its full luminous force right into your eyes. (There are small exceptions in the tiny carveouts for text and the patches of darker colors in photos and graphical elements). Though I don't have data at hand, I suspect this is a design flaw that exacerbates eye fatigue, mental exhaustion, and scattered concentration.
Personally, bright white screens blaring in my face all the live long day exhausts me, especially when those screens are 27" times 2.
For this reason, I invert my screen using assistive technologies. The primary side effect is that photos and graphical elements in web browsers are inverted and, for the most part, I used a custom style sheet in Safari, Chrome (now a plug-in), and Firefox to invert images and background images for sites I frequent often (e.g. NYtimes and YouTube).
With Safari 11.1, macOS automatically inverts most images when the screen is inverted. The solution is not perfect as the branding palettes of web sites and their background images are inverted, but I am pleased there is vendor acknowledgement that high luminosity visual fields can be mitigated. (To be clear, lowering screen brightness does not adequately address the issue because it reduces the visibility of all elements.)
My plea to web portals (Hi HN!), business units, design agencies, independent contractors, and hobby bloggers is to offer versions of their web sites that have dark backgrounds with light text and naturally-colored graphical elements.
The increasing availability of dark mode in professional applications forces users using assistive technologies to reduce background luminosity (while preserving glyph and foreground luminosity) to frequently switch between assisted and non-assisted modes.
If web sites (and, ahem, macOS Finder) shifted from bright backgrounds to dark backgrounds, users such as myself would be able to stop inverting their screens altogether.
FYI, for visually impaired users, Windows has offered dark high contrast themes since about forever. I say visually impaired because these themes use some weird colors that unimpaired users likely won't appreciate.
These high contrast themes also make web sites dark automatically, at least in Firefox and probably Edge (haven't checked Chrome).
Additionally, Windows 10 has a Dark mode that looks similar to what Apple is bringing to macOS, but I don't think that affects web sites at the moment.
I've been using a combination of two browser extensions:
1) Dark Night Mode
2) Stylish, with a custom theme specified by:
html { filter: grayscale(100%) !important; }
edit: after reading sibling post by m_ke, I'm trying out Dark Reader instead of Dark Night Mode (which seems to slow down my browser sometimes). Definitely enjoying Dark Reader
This is subjective and as old/unsettled an argument as vim vs emacs or spaces vs tabs - although what you're saying is true for you there are many people who argue the opposite. I must have spent at least a day's worth of hours over the years reading long threads with people debating over which is 'correct', 'safer', 'healthier' etc: dark on light or light on dark. People are different. Having a preference is normal but framing it as assistive tech is too much as there are people out there who feel a strain looking at light text on a dark background.
It depends largely on the ambient lighting. Dark themes are hard to read on my bright sunlit train journey and bright themes are often too much for a dimly lit room. I switch between both.
Yes. Healthy eyes depend on natural light or bright near-natural (but low UV) artificial light. Ambient light levels affect pupil dilation and focus, and screen brightness/colors should be matched as ambient light changes. At night, an hour or two before sleep, the blue content of light should be reduced (or lights dimmed) to trigger melatonin production for circadian cycle and sleep.
Summary: use light mode near daytime windows or quality indoor lighting, use dark mode or inverted colors in the dark.
I wonder: Does this let you scale between colors or is it just light or dark? On systems that support it, I always end up deciding on a sort of light gray appearance that's still darker than the typical Mac OS look. (And on CDE, I like the sand and teal ;-))
I recall an old beta of iOS having a much reported preview of dark mode. Several versions later it's still not on actual phones. I want a dark mode on my iPhone far more than on my laptop!
I could not care less about the colour scheme. But oh God please could we get stable, fast, reliable syntax highlighting and code completion, reliable refactoring, non-joke continuous integration support, collaborative editing, better testing tooling?
Wow this looks really good. Apple still the master of eye candy IMHO. Not gonna install the beta tomorrow though, you just know by now it's gonna be unusable at first.
Also I hope the editor gets a lot of improvements. I'm convinced now that one large reason why Kotlin feels so much better then Swift is simply the IDE. It's just magic compared to Xcode.
Doing some Objective C recently, I was disappointed to notice Xcode was much snappier and less buggy handling large ObjC codebases then Swift ones.
All I want this WWDC is an Apple sponsored Swift language server built on top of SourceKit. I cannot stand XCode, it’s a constant source of frustration.
As someone that had mostly worked in Eclipse with a smattering of CodeWarrior/NetBeans/IntelliJ/Visual Studio, having to work on an iOS project using Swift in XCode was a big surprise to me.
Just a terrible, terrible IDE. Even the default font felt wrong (presumably I could change that). I grew used to it crashing constantly, locking up, going off into the weeds when it felt like it.
I feel like Microsoft made a huge mistake in gating their IDE behind a big $$ cost back in the day (in so far as getting fresh new developers on board), I feel like Apple might be making the same mistake with XCode and their lack of attention to it.
33 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 83.8 ms ] threadIn the last five years or so, there has been a push in pro-level apps to include a dark mode.
While some may understand this change as an aesthetic choice, it's also an assistive technology, one that mitigates the visual fatigue that comes from staring into a screen for upwards of 10 hours per day.
It is a welcome change for professionals to have dark mode (visually assistive) interfaces and I wish that web sites would also make this shift or, at least, add the option.
By way of explanation, if one spends a lot of time reading the web or interacting with the file system (macOS, I'm looking at you) the computer display is blaring its full luminous force right into your eyes. (There are small exceptions in the tiny carveouts for text and the patches of darker colors in photos and graphical elements). Though I don't have data at hand, I suspect this is a design flaw that exacerbates eye fatigue, mental exhaustion, and scattered concentration.
Personally, bright white screens blaring in my face all the live long day exhausts me, especially when those screens are 27" times 2.
For this reason, I invert my screen using assistive technologies. The primary side effect is that photos and graphical elements in web browsers are inverted and, for the most part, I used a custom style sheet in Safari, Chrome (now a plug-in), and Firefox to invert images and background images for sites I frequent often (e.g. NYtimes and YouTube).
With Safari 11.1, macOS automatically inverts most images when the screen is inverted. The solution is not perfect as the branding palettes of web sites and their background images are inverted, but I am pleased there is vendor acknowledgement that high luminosity visual fields can be mitigated. (To be clear, lowering screen brightness does not adequately address the issue because it reduces the visibility of all elements.)
My plea to web portals (Hi HN!), business units, design agencies, independent contractors, and hobby bloggers is to offer versions of their web sites that have dark backgrounds with light text and naturally-colored graphical elements.
The increasing availability of dark mode in professional applications forces users using assistive technologies to reduce background luminosity (while preserving glyph and foreground luminosity) to frequently switch between assisted and non-assisted modes.
If web sites (and, ahem, macOS Finder) shifted from bright backgrounds to dark backgrounds, users such as myself would be able to stop inverting their screens altogether.
EDIT: add missing verb "is" in 9th paragraph.
These high contrast themes also make web sites dark automatically, at least in Firefox and probably Edge (haven't checked Chrome).
Additionally, Windows 10 has a Dark mode that looks similar to what Apple is bringing to macOS, but I don't think that affects web sites at the moment.
edit: after reading sibling post by m_ke, I'm trying out Dark Reader instead of Dark Night Mode (which seems to slow down my browser sometimes). Definitely enjoying Dark Reader
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/15142/whic...
http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2010/05/20/i-hate-...
https://www.wordpress-web-designer-raleigh.com/2015/04/16/4-...
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/8153/what-are-the-neg...
Summary: use light mode near daytime windows or quality indoor lighting, use dark mode or inverted colors in the dark.
http://apptrailers.itunes.apple.com/apple-assets-us-std-0000...
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I recall an old beta of iOS having a much reported preview of dark mode. Several versions later it's still not on actual phones. I want a dark mode on my iPhone far more than on my laptop!
On one hand, rightly so - my eyes need this feature. On the other hand, it's kind of ridiculous we had to wait until Xcode 10/macOS 10.14 to get this.
Also I hope the editor gets a lot of improvements. I'm convinced now that one large reason why Kotlin feels so much better then Swift is simply the IDE. It's just magic compared to Xcode.
Doing some Objective C recently, I was disappointed to notice Xcode was much snappier and less buggy handling large ObjC codebases then Swift ones.
Just a terrible, terrible IDE. Even the default font felt wrong (presumably I could change that). I grew used to it crashing constantly, locking up, going off into the weeds when it felt like it.
I feel like Microsoft made a huge mistake in gating their IDE behind a big $$ cost back in the day (in so far as getting fresh new developers on board), I feel like Apple might be making the same mistake with XCode and their lack of attention to it.