Leaked screenshots of Xcode 10 on macOS 10.14

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In the last five years or so, there has been a push in pro-level apps to include a dark mode.

While some may understand this change as an aesthetic choice, it's also an assistive technology, one that mitigates the visual fatigue that comes from staring into a screen for upwards of 10 hours per day.

It is a welcome change for professionals to have dark mode (visually assistive) interfaces and I wish that web sites would also make this shift or, at least, add the option.

By way of explanation, if one spends a lot of time reading the web or interacting with the file system (macOS, I'm looking at you) the computer display is blaring its full luminous force right into your eyes. (There are small exceptions in the tiny carveouts for text and the patches of darker colors in photos and graphical elements). Though I don't have data at hand, I suspect this is a design flaw that exacerbates eye fatigue, mental exhaustion, and scattered concentration.

Personally, bright white screens blaring in my face all the live long day exhausts me, especially when those screens are 27" times 2.

For this reason, I invert my screen using assistive technologies. The primary side effect is that photos and graphical elements in web browsers are inverted and, for the most part, I used a custom style sheet in Safari, Chrome (now a plug-in), and Firefox to invert images and background images for sites I frequent often (e.g. NYtimes and YouTube).

With Safari 11.1, macOS automatically inverts most images when the screen is inverted. The solution is not perfect as the branding palettes of web sites and their background images are inverted, but I am pleased there is vendor acknowledgement that high luminosity visual fields can be mitigated. (To be clear, lowering screen brightness does not adequately address the issue because it reduces the visibility of all elements.)

My plea to web portals (Hi HN!), business units, design agencies, independent contractors, and hobby bloggers is to offer versions of their web sites that have dark backgrounds with light text and naturally-colored graphical elements.

The increasing availability of dark mode in professional applications forces users using assistive technologies to reduce background luminosity (while preserving glyph and foreground luminosity) to frequently switch between assisted and non-assisted modes.

If web sites (and, ahem, macOS Finder) shifted from bright backgrounds to dark backgrounds, users such as myself would be able to stop inverting their screens altogether.

EDIT: add missing verb "is" in 9th paragraph.

Just a terrible, terrible IDE. Even the default font felt wrong (presumably I could change that). I grew used to it crashing constantly, locking up, going off into the weeds when it felt like it.

I feel like Microsoft made a huge mistake in gating their IDE behind a big $$ cost back in the day (in so far as getting fresh new developers on board), I feel like Apple might be making the same mistake with XCode and their lack of attention to it.