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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Do not worry for the market is ready for this. Iphone started with fixed backgrounds, then later they demonstrated the oh so amazing feature of custom backgrounds. In some 80s computer chronicles episode you can find the ex-act-same-speech from a windows sales rep explaining how win 1.0 was limited, but now you can set up your own background pattern. iOS 15 will introduce ML generated computer vision trained custom themed that fits the most seen colours in your rooms.

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Yes, it's funny when some new app announces "now we have dark mode!" with much fanfare and commotion, when the ability to adjust the colours and appearance of individual UI elements across the whole OS was the norm back in Windows 3.

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...

If the apps celebrating their new dark mode feature would use the OS GUI toolkit they wouldn't have to worry about that. Many "modern" desktop apps rely on web based technology which throws them back ages in terms of UI and UX

Many "modern" desktop apps rely on web based technology which throws them back ages in terms of UI and UX

For an even more WTF experience, look at how CSS had defined how web apps could use the system-defined colours for UI elements, but then it was deprecated due to a very thin "insufficient" and "security/privacy" argument:

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/#deprecated-system-colors

Obviously they could be made sufficient (imagine if JS was deprecated because it was deemed "insufficient" for making applications behave natively...), and things like Electron could use them without worrying about "security" since it's not in pages served over the network.

(That "security/privacy" argument is really thin, especially when considering how much less customisable the colours have become in newer OSs!)

Unfortunately, "because security!" is currently a trump card that wins all arguments. On the one hand I get it, security has been pretty neglected in the industry over the past decades, but I think we also really ought to have a conversation about the costs of security.

The ultimate state of perfect security for a system is a dead rock. Everything that's interesting and useful can only happen in the state of some lack of security.

Strictly speaking, they also have to be compiled against a new enough SDK to get Dark Mode support via the native GUI widgets. For apps that need backward compatibility, that can get hairy. (But yeah, that’s nothing compared to what Electron has wrought.)

Windows 3 themes never worked that well though. Dark mode is a single Boolean flag, which is much easier for application developers to follow.

Dark mode is a single Boolean flag, which is much easier for application developers to follow.

The whole point is that application developers don't even have to care about it if they do things right, by using the OS's UI controls they will automatically be drawn with whatever colour the user has set.

But in reality, apps didn't perfectly follow the theme, and an attempt at "dark" theming resulted in big bright splotches of white on your CRT monitor.

That was a problem then, but today, you'd think cases like this would be immediately reported as bugs on the issue trackers. Unfortunately, while we've gained in the development support tooling and speed of software distribution, we've also lost the basic sanity of GUI implementation.

App developers didn't even have to set colors.

You could tell the ones who didn't know what they were doing by the invisible text littering their UIs under some color schemes. This continued into the Web era. There were tons of defective sites that overrode your system background color with a hard-coded white background, but didn't bother setting the text color to black.

The result was invisible text on any system with a "dark" (non-inverse) color scheme. DUHHHH

There are probably still millions of such sites today, but now UIs are so gimped that they hide the defect.

For some reason, the new gimp version has a dark mode layout with an almost black, gray background

But the file dialogs have black text. You can hardly read anything

It was there in the first version, even.

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...

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