100% agree. I was working yesterday evening with my eyes tired (and my vision is still pretty good!), and I had to lower brightness every time I switched to Figma so it didn’t hurt my eyes. I had background light on in the room.
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Replying to @mwichary @nikolasklein
Computers used white on black long before they were even able to display black on white. Early CRTs were of a vector type and the background had to be black. I’m just saying that it’s hilarious that this old idea suddenly has a cool marketing name and rabid followers
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The playa-hatin rabid followers is understandable but: 1. New rapid followers maybe weren't computing around CRT time, so it's new to them 2. Behavior and time spent on computers (persona/professional) today vs then is wildly different
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Yes, in addition to that display quality today is good enough that you can have subtle contrast changes and light-on-dark text is not a mess of fuzzy, fringing pixels like in the 1970s.
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Some vector displays were really high res! I tried an original Asteroids arcade machine at an exhibition in Berlin and the detail was astonishing. (I know there was also a “raster” like use of vector displays which wasn't as detailed :–)https://youtu.be/w60sfReTsRA?t=22 …
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Replying to @rsms
QuadraScans! I love those. But I meant more the halo around lit vectors/pixels, which all arcade displays shared. In offices, I believe it was a human factors catch 22: Halo was bad for ergonomics. Removing it meant sacrificing contrast, which was… bad for ergonomics. :·)
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I’m not really an expert on display history, but I think throughout 1970s, dark-on-light text was rarely attempted because the halo would just bleed into text too much?
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Only later with Mac, maybe NeXT, and then Windows in the 1990s… and non-CRT displays, of course. We got so excited about the desktop metaphor that we haven’t seen light-on-dark much before iPhone brought it half-back in 2007, in a very different world.
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So I think part of the excitement is that to many people it does feel like a new thing! But if you put aside the marketing and excitement, I believe there are some genuine benefits…
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…and the dark modes of today, while superficially similar to command lines of 1970s and 1980s, can be done much better and with much more thoughtfulness. Not that the last part’s always there. :·)
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(I’m actually sad those vector displays disappeared. I believe they were just a maintenance nightmare, and the hollow polygon aesthetic fell out of fashion, right?
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But what’s fun is that raster displays today are good enough to emulate QuadraScans with all their imperfections even! Which is kind of fascinating.)
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Replying to @mwichary
Just realized I’m wearing my Asteroids socks today! Fun coincidence.pic.twitter.com/lNYt1hcQRy
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