Comment by htfu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by htfu | Hacker News Reader

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Speaking of dark mode. How bizarre is it that after all this time Apple finally puts something in iOS, and IT JUST MADE THINGS WORSE.

In the beginning there was invert colors. Then came smart invert - it worked with some things, failed with others, but was generally pretty good.

Dark mode (by way of prefers-color-scheme etc) should make things awesome in the long run, but at least for now all that's happened is to keep things dark I have to juggle fucking THREE different switches - and end up having to fall back to classic invert most of the time. Smart invert basically stopped functioning with iOS 13.

Properly implemented they could've had a fallback css override a la DarkReader and just put an extra switch per-website, crowdsourcing the results, as well as keep their own database/system override for lazy developers with already-dark apps who refuse to respect wishes (nudge nudge, Spotify...).

Ok, this is ranty, but this is such a weird regression touted as a "feature". Poor form.

While I agree with you that it's super annoying to be browsing in dark mode, just to open an app or website that hasn't implemented this.

But I disagree that Apple should be doing all the work, I really don't want them pushing their design opinions even further upon us (no matter how great they might be)

Not sure if this exists yet (although I think I've seen it before); a CSS parser that will automatically generate all the correct media queries to have a dark mode. Done by smartly inverting colours, possibly giving the chance to quickly override them yourself.

This is basically what email clients have been settling on doing, recently—though they have the luxury of working with a static resource, and not needing to handle any dynamic stuff.

https://litmus.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-dark-mode-for-... is a good article about this. We just released this sort of functionality for Fastmail’s webmail within the last few days, too, matching what Litmus calls a partial colour invert. We find that it doesn’t satisfy quite everyone, but the overall experience is much improved. I myself use light mode for my work email and dark for my personal email (partly to distinguish them, partly so I’m testing it—otherwise I’d prefer light mode), and this general approach has produced very good results in all but one case I’ve experienced so far (and that one was still acceptable).

Chrome on Mac allowed you to choose between four or five different algorithms last I checked. At least this was somewhere in the chrome://flags of canary, about half a year ago?

None of it is perfect. I know programmers believe anything that's not software or brewing a flat white should be automated, but dark designs are inherently difficult because the pleasant ridge is narrow, with contrast always close to being too high or too low. As of yet, it really need a designer's eye.

The only way dark mode can ever be done properly is if every single website and app developer implements it themselves. Every other way of doing it is a hack. Apple did what they could. At least this project makes it somewhat easier for websites to implement. For my purposes, all I need at this point is Quora. Goddamn it Quora, why can’t you see the light?

I think if a website designer does not use CSS then they should not need to implement dark mode either, because if no CSS is specified then the user's settings should be used, so they can have dark if they want it to be. (If a web page has no CSS, then I don't need to put in my own; just since they put in their own CSS rather than using my settings, I have to override them then my own.)

> Goddamn it Quora, why can’t you see the dark?

FTFY

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