Items tagged with dark mode
One of the most annoying things about using any electronic device at night or in a dark room is the retina-searing, light mode that most apps have by default. Microsoft, however, has finally addressed this problem on Xbox consoles, and is working on a new night mode which is now available to beta testers. Using the new Alpha Skip-Ahead ring, Xbox owners will be able to dim and filter their screens to help protect against sleep-affecting blue light emissions. Moreover, they will also be able to dim their console and controller LED brightness, so the normally bright white light is not so harsh. Coupling these new features with the dark mode system theme should then provide a much better...
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Over the past few years, smartphone operating systems -- namely, Android and iOS -- have adopted Dark Mode options to reduce eye strain at night and help save battery life on devices with OLED displays. For that latter point, the general idea is that OLED-equipped smartphones don't need to power portions of the display with a black background, leading to power savings. However, researchers at Perdue University decided to question that perception about how much Dark Mode improves efficiency. "When the industry rushed to adopt dark mode, it didn't have the tools yet to accurately measure power draw by the pixels," said Purdue Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Charlie Hu. To test this...
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“Dark mode” or “night mode” has long been popular with tech users. It is also now increasingly being adopted by major apps and operating systems. However, is dark mode simply an aesthetic preference or can it provide benefits to users? Companies and services like Google, Apple, and Facebook offer or plan to offer dark mode to help reduce eyestrain, increase battery life, and decrease display flickering. Many apps and operating systems tend to prefer light user interfaces (UI). This brighter interface or “dark-on-light color scheme” was originally introduced in word processors to mimic the look of dark ink on light paper. A light UI is generally considered...
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Windows users who often work in a dark room know that the standard white or brightly colored screens that are used by default can be eye-searing. To fix this issue, some popular apps are starting to roll out with Dark Mode support to tone things down a bit. Dark mode for Chrome on Windows 10 was confirmed as coming in January. Google has now released Chrome 74 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android users. The biggest thing in any of those releases is that Dark Mode has now landed for Windows users. Mac users received support for Dark Mode with Chrome 73 that launched last month. Google decided to offer no direct method for Windows users to enable this mode as there is no option in Chrome...
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Dark Mode seems to be all the rage these days with desktop and mobile operating systems (and their complementing apps), and now Facebook is getting in on the action. The social network giant has now included a new dark mode in its popular Messenger app, and it’s relatively easy to enable. The dark mode in Messenger can be accessed either with Android or iOS versions of the app, and you’ll first need to send the crescent moon emoji (clever) to one of your contacts (or to yourself), after which you’ll some fancy animations and a message telling you that you’ve found dark mode. You’ll be then given the option to enable it in settings, which should turn your...
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Google is starting to see the light (darkness?) in offering users a dark mode option for some of its products and services, such as Android and YouTube. Some people find dark themes to simply be less straining on the eyes. If you're one of them and you own a Windows 10 PC, we have good news—a dark mode option is being added to Google's Chrome browser. Confirmation of this comes from Chrome developer Peter Kasting, who in May of last year submitted a bug report related to having a dark mode. "Windows 10 allows users to set their apps to 'light' or 'dark' mode. Chrome should respect this. The most obvious hack is to use the default incognito color scheme in normal mode (as well as incognito)...
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Most smartphone users understand that one of the things that will consume your battery the fastest is having your screen brightness set to maximum. Google recently talked with developers at its Android Dev Summit about what they can do to build apps that are as easy on the battery inside Android devices as possible. The details Google offered up show that not only does battery consumption in apps depend on screen brightness, but the colors the devs choose for the apps can have a significant impact on battery life as well. If the apps run the screen at full brightness, power consumption goes up significantly; in fact, Google notes that brightness affects power usage in a mostly linear fashion....
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Google has been working on a dark mode for its YouTube app for a long time now, after having rolled it out to the web and then later to Apple's iOS platform. Well, guess what? Android users finally have access to it as well, and can join the dark side. It's not clear if Google has enabled the dark theme on all Android devices just yet, but it is available on at least some of them. The dark theme option started appearing on Android devices as we headed into last weekend. Some users report having seen it enabled automatically when firing up YouTube on their smartphones, along with a pop-up notifying them that it is a new feature. Users could then choose to dismiss the prompt and enjoy the dark...
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Many users have been clamoring for a system-wide “dark mode” in Android. Besides being a preferred UI scheme for some users, a dark mode would help to cut down on glare at night (something that GPS apps already take advantage of) and help reduce power requirements on OLED displays. Android fans were given a glimmer of hope when a Google Issue Tracker thread — which was initially started back in November 2017 — requested a dark mode for Android 9.0. After months of inactivity, the issue was marked as “fixed”. Android users were further stoked by a Google team member that said the feature would be “available in a future Android release.” But before...
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