But isn’t that the case? They just put it in a prominent place. I know quite a few people who tried it, didn’t like it, reverted and forgot about DM’s existence.
It’s right at the top of Display & Brightness, suggesting that it’s appropriate for everyone, not just those who need to modify the standard interface for a particular condition. And Apple has advertised it as one of the main features of Mojave and iOS 13. So that’s why I suggest it’s not like Reduce Transparency or Smart Invert, which are hidden away inside Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size.
XtraFinder is working for me with Mojave 10.14.6
Nate
That explains a lot. I’ve always had difficulty with dark backgrounds and I have astigmatism (not to mention the high myopia). And still ignorant people push it for everyone (some even criticize/mock people who use light mode)
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Can you merely imagine if someone had started introducing to us, as “the next big thing” black paper upon which we would print or write our contents in white ink!? LOL!
They’d surely be the laughingstock! Yet people just jump into this “dark mode” concept like it is an ingenious discovery!
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The Nielsen Norman Group has now weighed in on the topic of dark mode vs light mode with a survey of the research and they came to essentially the same conclusion I did:
In users with normal vision, light mode leads to better performance most of the time.
Pre-cataract surgery I used a dim screen (dark mode wasn’t around then). Now that my vision has been corrected, I’m back to the normal brightness.
However, I work on Keynote presentations with someone who has vision issues and uses dark mode on her laptop. She constantly uses both a pale yellow and a very pale yellow-blue in her presentations. The problem comes in when the slides are displayed on the large bright white screen, in a room with bright overhead lighting–her words and soft graphics all fade away. I’m left previewing and then coming home to correct while still leaving her creativity intact. Adds an additional amount of time for me each week. Oh well.
At JNUC I saw the reverse of this problem—the room was really dark and they had three large screens. If a slide was mostly white, it was a serious shock to the eyes because they had the projector brightness cranked. There were lots of calls for dark mode in that case, purely for not getting blasted with bright white light.
Of course, proper adjustment of the projectors and the room lighting would also have solved the problem.
There’s the key, but when you can’t adjust the lighting in the room, then the slide maker needs to be aware and adjust accordingly–and not to their own preferences/needs. I can’t seem to get my co-worker to follow this logic, so I modify.
One thing I didn’t notice in the article or the replies is that Apple’s “Light Mode” is not black on white: It’s grey on white. Somewhere along the line they switched to washed out grey text on a white background and there is no way to change it. I was constantly straining to read it because of the lack of contrast. Dark Mode has been a boon for me with it’s crisp white text on a dark background. Yes, I know that there are accessibility features to increase contrast, make things black and white, etc. But they distort everything, not just the text. It doesn’t take a weatherman to tell when its raining and it doesn’t take a bunch of studies for me to figure out what I prefer. Thank you, Apple, for Dark Mode.
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This depends greatly on the app in question and how you have it configured.
Color configuration (for browsers that support it) and a custom CSS file (for Safari) can help enormously in this area.
But I agree that Apple’s defaults are not good.
Nielsen Norman Group has a good article about dark mode, concluding that it’s mostly useful for perceived aesthetic reasons and for people with particular vision issues, but not usability. The article also shows some of the problems that it can create for designers and suggests scenarios where it’s most useful.
It occurs to me that Dark Mode was a prerequisite for Big Sur’s transparent menu bar. My desktop switches between over 700 different pictures, and in the vast majority of them, the menus and menubar icons are white on a dark background. Does that depend on the apps having support for Dark Mode versions of their icons?
There is a flaw though: when the background is dark on the top right, but very light on the top left, I get white menus on a near-white background.
I’ve never been a fan of dark mode. It ‘looks’ cool but I find it very difficult to work with. It bothers me when apps don’t offer an alternative eg. Capture One.
Similar with web pages, I’m not a fan of reading white text on dark backgrounds.
Amateur:heart_eyes:
Dark Mode sure does inspire enduring threads! I must have commented on this one some time in the past three years because I still get notifications. 
My experience since the pandemic started was using screens for hours and hours. I noticed in the past year that I was experiencing sudden tearing and light sensitivity in my left eye after a long day of this. Getting away from the screen helped relieve this. If I had more work to do, dimming helped some, and Dark Mode completely relieved it.
But I retired at the end of June from that work. I’m using my Mac, iPhone, iPad, and so on, a “mere” 2 to 3 hours a day now, and I’m not having those symptoms any more.
(Ophthalmologists, I hear your cheers!)
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Years and years ago, computer monitors had black screens with green letters. They were certainly ugly.
Then real black & white monitors; black screen and white letters, were introduced. I reversed the image so black letters would be displayed on the white background and my co-workers kept asking why I was doing that. I explained to them that it seemed more natural, like reading a newspaper or a book.
Now, we’re back to a dark background again. History certainly repeats itself.
I remember (ages ago now) the CAD department at my employer worked in dark rooms. They had very large (and expensive) CRT monitors that displayed primary-color line graphics on a black background. The displays were deliberately kept dim to prevent burn-in and the draftspeople worked in dimly-lit rooms in order to comfortably see these displays.
But that was a peculiar case at the time.
On the other hand, when I was in college, most of the computer science people (myself included) worked in dimly-lit rooms. For me, it was because I was always working late and my roommates wanted to sleep. So the dark-background displays (often with the brightness turned down) made a lot of sense.
But today, when I’m working in a brightly-lit room, dark displays are pretty hard to read. And I really don’t like working in the dark.
But we’ve got yet another generation of younger people who work late into the night and don’t want to be blinded by a white-background screen when the rest of the room is dark.
I find dark mode works to my advantage on flights where the majority of the passengers are watching movies or TV shows on their devices. All the window shades have been lowered, and any screen on a bright setting is certainly noticed by all the surrounding passengers. In that narrow case setting, dark mode is considered polite.
That being said, although I use dark mode system-wide on my M2 MacBook Air, all my text applications have had their settings set to show black print on a white background within their app windows. I fully agree that’s a lot easier on my eyes than the reverse.
It goes without saying, mine is a narrow use case and a small percentage of the public is flying as often as I do. But I do appreciate it as an available option for me to choose.
I feel more productive using Light Mode, but one of the first things I do on a new computer is configure its terminal app to use black backgrounds with traditional analog terminal colors, like green, cyan, and/or amber.
I don’t think it makes me more productive, but it does bring back the 1980s feeling of going to the computer room in the basement of my college dorm to use one of the TeleVideo or VT terminals to check email. It’s strange to think of a time when email was rare, even for college kids.
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