White all over Smalltalks UIs are a reason why I do *not* use them. Dark Pharo: good.
Properly themeable Pharo with a palette and logical color mappings: nirvana. I hope to contribute to that. I did some GToolkit dark theming but it was too late for 6.0 so maybe for 7. Try to code against a white background when you have floaters casting shadows on your retina. I sucks big time. I noticed that a lot of older folk suffer from this. I once had a guy who wasn't telling younger team members that he wasn't able to read their document due to too small fonts. We are talking C level executives here... These accessibility issues are going to become huge with people getting older and having cash to spend. >From what I can so see, hearing problems will be quite a thing with newer generations. Anyway, there is NegativeScreen on Windows to get whatever I want. http://arcanesanctum.net/negativescreen/ Phil On Aug 29, 2017 6:02 AM, "Markus Stumptner" <m...@cs.unisa.edu.au> wrote: > On 28/08/17 06:07, Dimitris Chloupis wrote: > > >> I completely agree - dark mode is great for content that you want to >> look cool, but no one consumes. :-) >> > > You assume wrong cause dark themes have been dominating GUIs for over 3 > decades now. > > Not really; bright on dark was only dominant in the days of the CRT > terminal when there were no "themes". (Even if you could do it as a > hardware switch, setting, say, a VT220 to black-on-white both looked > terrible as it was more an uneven gray, and tended to dim the tube more > quickly by burning in the background.) > > Instead, since full bitmap graphics happened, all screen interfaces back > to Xerox's prototype office systems, then Lisa/Macintosh, and then Windows > 2.1 have been using dark type on a white background for text work. Partly > this was because of the original office metaphor, but partly also because > it was shown that it was easier (meaning, less error prone) to read. > > Here's a study that showed that participants were 26% more accurate in > reading text that way (note that "contrast reversal" on displays in those > days meant dark characters on white background): > > Bauer, D., & Cavonius, C., R. (1980). Improving the legibility of visual > display units through contrast reversal. > In E. Grandjean, E. Vigliani (Eds.), Ergonomic Aspects of Visual Display > Terminals (pp. 137-142). > London: Taylor & Francis > > There were other studies in the 1980s that didn't report lower errors but > instead faster reading with black on white. Academically, the matter's > pretty much considered settled - black on white is better for most of the > population, and that's on screen, not on paper. (You can substitute any > degree of light or creamy for the white, that's really a variation of > screen quality.) > The engineering workstations of the late 80s and 90s (Sun etc) used black > and white as the application default as well, with white on black limited > to console/shell windows. This was partly for consistency with the old > style, partly for easy contrast with application windows in a multi-window > environment. > > Pharo was the rare exception of using a white theme. Light themes may be > popular but white are definitely not. The web is the last fort of bright > themes, but the web was and still is eons behind when it comes to matters > of UI. > > Most other Smalltalks are dark-on-light by default all the way back to > Smalltalk-80 out of Xerox PARC. None of this had anything to do with the > Web, which came after, but which obviously also profits from the same > increase in readability. Rather than behind, Smalltalk was ahead and the > rest of the world followed. > > The dark theme as default in Pharo I personally consider a step back. As > someone who's been busy for 25+ years defending use of Smalltalk for real > applications, a return to a primarily developer-cool presentation instead > of a user-oriented default is IMO not a plus for a language branch that was > billed as more industry-oriented (which IMO is not exactly the same as > developer-oriented). But I also understand the desire to attract > developers with the look that's currently fashionable. > > That said, I wonder if the recent preference for dark among developers > (not Pharo-specific, but many languages) has to do with the rise of > widespread code highlighting. I could see how colour highlighting shows up > better on a dark background than being glared over by a white one. > > Markus >
