Month: May 2021

Are you attracted to the Dark Side?

Recently many apps and desktop backgrounds have sprouted a “dark mode” option or theme, reducing the amount of white light that strikes your eyes. It’s a welcome option in Kindle Reader, Apple Books, and Overdrive Media, giving respite to tired eyes especially in the evening when the greatest eye fatigue sets in and the ambient light is more subdued.

Dark mode is now making its way into writing apps, such as my go-to editor, iA Writer, and I, for one, am delighted (pun intended). For long-haul ebook reading and for writing, I prefer dark mode, finding it causes me less eyestrain than light mode.

Dark mode isn’t something new, though. It was a previous age’s standard.

A Little History

If your memory goes back to the 1980s or earlier, you may remember that computer monitors, and terminals before that, had a black background with white, green, or amber characters. This was in the age of command-line MS-DOS, CP/M, Commodore, TRS-80, and other PCs of the era. When colour computing became an option, screens were often dark blue, with white letters — classic WordPerfect colours. Dark mode has a long history.

Things changed abruptly, in 1984, the original Macintosh computer (and Unix workstations before the Mac was released), introduced a graphical, windowed environment. Soon Microsoft Windows followed, and the new white background with dark letters became de rigeur, proving ideal for desktop publishing and word processing.

We’re now used to seeing our work as a kind of virtual paper with black letters on a white background. This has been the standard for so long that the dark mode had largely been forgotten, other than for command-line users, many of whom adjust their terminal emulation colours to white on black.

The Dark Way

Some changes are the result of fads and it’s become stylish suddenly to sport dark mode backgrounds. Apple has taken this a step further by introducing wallpapers that change mode from light to dark depending on the time of day. Whatever the reasons, dark mode has again become popular, especially among computer geeks.

Gizmo China ran a poll in 2020 asking which do you prefer: Light Mode or Dark Mode? Approximately 78% of the 562 participants preferred dark mode, 11% preferred light, and 11% preferred “scheduled mode” — light mode during the day and dark mode in the evening.

Which is Better?

“Better” is a subjective term, of course, and for many of us “better” is simply what we’re used to. There have been some studies on this and the answer seems to be “it depends.” When ambient light is high, as it often is during the day in a well-lit room, light mode is easier on the eyes because the pupils are contracted and black on white is easier to see. In the evening, though, when the light begins to fade and the ambient light is less strong, our pupils dilate more and white on black is easier to read for many users. “Scheduled mode,” which you can set up in Apple’s Books app, for instance, is an ideal balance.

As far as I know, no one has done an informal study on whether dark mode conserves battery life on a laptop. It should, for the simple reason that black on the screen indicates LCD pixels that are switched off, and a lot of laptop battery power goes into powering the screen. In light mode, most of the pixels are drawing full power.

With these factors in mind, it might be worthwhile for you to “visit” the dark side to see if it works for you. The only right answer to the question of which is better is this: “Your eyes, your call.”