dark mode has swept over the internet
like a dark grey tidal wave with hints
of dark blue nowadays whether you're on reddit twitter youtube or basically
anything else even our forum there's probably some sort of option to
change the color scheme to match the black void in your soul but
is it really possible to dark mode every aspect of your digital
life and why would you want to
we're going to let you know right after i tell you about memory
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a huge reason that people use dark mode is because they say that reading white
text on a dark background is easier on the eyes and this is especially true at
night when the ambient light is low
but that subjective analysis actually goes
against a lot of the conventional wisdom
for years monitor manufacturers have boasted of brighter and brighter
displays and according to both traditional ui design guidelines and
studies that rate the readability of various combinations of text and
background colors dark text on a white background is still
the number one most readable configuration and indeed as humans spend
more and more of their time staring at screens it has become apparent that the
conventional wisdom isn't always the best thing for our eyes scientists are
now studying new conditions like digital
eye strain and computer vision syndrome finding that large amounts of time spent
looking at screens can contribute to sleeplessness headaches dry eyes and
blurred vision and other studies have found that reading black text on a white
background can even contribute to increased myopia aka nearsightedness so
then on to ways to lessen the strain on your
eyes now one way is called night mode and this is usually a setting
on your monitor or on your device that attempts to filter out or reduce the
blue light that your screen is emitting making it less likely to disrupt your
circadian rhythm causing you to unintentionally spend the whole night
going down a wikipedia black hole but night mode is different from dark mode
dark mode is not a filter so much as it's a color scheme or a theme that can
be applied either to a specific application or in some cases even system
wide so what this means is that while it can improve comfort it doesn't
necessarily have the sleep benefits of night mode and in brightly lit
environments it can actually strain your eyes in exactly the same way that a
bright screen can in a dark room also
with dark mode the implementation depends heavily on the developer and not
all dark modes are made equal okay then so you're ready to take the
plunge and dark mode your life let's start with Windows 10. Windows has
actually had theme support for a very long time does anyone else remember
window blinds no oh bummer anyway now there's a handy
option right in the color settings to switch to the dark default app mode this
will make built-in Windows apps like settings calculator and alarms almost
fully black now it might also
automatically apply to photos movies and groove music but if it doesn't you can
go into those app settings and switch it on manually file explorer still doesn't
have dark mode support so you can expect sudden
retina searing light if you dare to browse c
but that is supposed to be coming in the october update so uh
microsoft does still have some work to do but if you don't like the built-in
dark mode they also have the option for you to customize Windows high contrast
settings to basically create your own
but even what i said just now assuming it all goes perfectly is only the built-in
microsoft apps i mean who spends their
whole day using those what about the one app that people probably use the most
their web browser well edge and firefox both have built-in
dark themes and while there is no official dark mode for chrome the
browser's theme and extension support mean that you can essentially kind of
tack one on so there's a category page for dark themes in the chrome web store
and popular ones include material incognito dark and morpheon dark with
the former being our pick but a theme just changes the toolbar websites are
still going to present themselves normally so some more tweaking is
required now a lot of websites have built in dark modes including twitter
youtube reddit the Linus tech tips forum and
gmail's inbox actually although
curiously for that last one daring to actually open an email will still blind
you as for the rest of the web you can install the dark reader extension which
is also available for firefox and safari on macOS it analyzes colors and tries
to make web pages look like an official dark mode with some settings available
for customization as well it solves gmail's dark mode problem but it can
also cause some glitchiness and delayed loading at times thankfully you can
actually teach it to enable or disable itself automatically site by site
now on to another popular app microsoft office there is an official
dark mode or dark theme found in the settings but
it sucks it doesn't affect the actual page color
you will have to go to design then page color for that and if you dare to make
comments add markups to a page or try to highlight anything you will quickly
discover some of its many flaws if you're a macOS user well you no doubt
already know about mojave's dark mode it's got a number of customization
options and it affects all of the os's built-in apps then for everything else
the handy website dark mode list has a directory of a ton of macOS apps that
support dark mode also if you install a third-party app like night owl or shifty
you can customize and even automate dark modes to turn on and off depending on
the time of day iOS is where things start to get really interesting though
so apple added a feature in the iOS accessibility settings called smart
invert colors which does exactly what it sounds like it inverts the colors in
every app but it also analyzes the screen to skip over
stuff like icons and images the result
is something that's actually pretty dang close to a true system-wide dark mode
although you might not like the way that it makes some apps look like google maps
fortunately apple thought of that and you can assign the mode to turn on or
off when you triple click the power button pretty awesome
what is not quite as awesome is Android's implementation of dark mode
now google finally added a dark mode option but it only affects quick
settings the app drawer and maybe the contacts and phone app
notifications and the full settings app remain light which is pretty irritating
you can change individual apps to dark mode phone messages youtube news maps
that is in navigation mode google play games authenticator gboard and the
google discover feed but your mileage may vary that is still not working on
riley's pixel now Android does have an invert colors option but it literally
just inverts the colors with no post processing to preserve images so it
really sucks there is the substratum engine an app that enables more robust
theming support but it requires that you root your device on all versions of
Android except oreo so obviously there are some trade-offs with dark mode not
the least of which being that from a ui design standpoint it is more difficult
to make it look good and there's still work to be done to the point where i
could see people just opting not to bother if it's going to be this much of
a hassle but aside from everything we've talked
about so far with respect to improved comfort there are some other benefits as
well so for example if you're on a mobile device you could actually realize
measurable battery savings at their Android dev summit google said
that using dark mode in the youtube app on an OLED screen could reduce your
battery usage by as much as 40 percent
though it should be noted that this was at maximum brightness oh yeah right i
guess riley didn't write an outro for this i guess that wasn't the
maximum brightest idea
oh yeah it's a good thing i have a writing staff
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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
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check it out it has shirts like this one and our community forum which you should
totally join and then enable dark mode on