I know dark mode is all the rage. A must-have for the trend-sensitive software developer. However, the reason to have dark mode is to save people’s eyes in dark rooms… not blast them to pieces.

Take a look at Microsoft Office’s dark mode fail in a dark room, I dare you:

Of course, dark mode done right will have its issues as well… Try to pick out the orange colored comment in Scrivener’s dark mode… if you can:

Yeah, no. Those aren’t the names of the colors 😀 and it’s easy to pick the right one when you have the others for contrast, but wait till you open a document with comments in one color… is it yellow, orange, red? Ummm…

But at least Scrivener won’t leave white spots dancing in front of your eyes for the rest of the evening… so that’s always something…

I for one have learned not to use Mac OS’s Mail app to send customer mail when in dark mode. Those CCed names are pretty much hidden and all of a sudden internal e-mails become external and you find yourself wishing you’d been better at keeping your promise to never say (or write) anything about someone you wouldn’t say to them.