Blackle
-
Someone posted a blog that a black Google page would save energy. It's an interesting idea, and I'm sure there are many millions of CRTs still in use today. I just replaced my 20" CRT with an LCD panel earlier this year, so I bet that this could help.
However it seems that the switch to LCDs is occurring at an extremely rapid rate, so fast that I bet the majority of Google searches will be made on LCDs soon. Even so, you can use Blackle if you like.
However that's not what I'm wondering this week. This week the poll is:
Is it better to work on a dark background or a light one?
By that I mean do you prefer a white or light background when you code or type with dark lettering? Or are you more interested in a dark or black background with light text?
At first glance I thought I'd never want a black background. But then I thought back to my Apple II days where I had an amber monitor, dark background except for the light colored text. Space Invaders? I spent many hours on my Atari system with this and other games that had a black background and white text or images. I also typed many, many papers on screens setup the same way, with green or white text.
So which way works better for you?
-
For me, it's application-specific. If I'm writing in Word, I use a white background. If I'm drafting in AutoCAD (which I rarely do anymore) I like a black background.
For games, I like darker better. I guess that's a response to games usually being darker.
:{> Andy
Andy Leonard, Chief Data Engineer, Enterprise Data & Analytics
-
I surely like the existing White background for everything. It becomes a lil uncomfortable to get my eyes adjusted to a black background for everything!!
Archana
-
Black background is easy on eyes, for me. By the way its quite old school ... remember blackboards in school?
Also the question is which gives out more elaboration to what u are doing (writting text) and not where (desktop / background color) you are doing ... white on black OR black on white ... for me its the first one.
The blackle idea is surely intresting one.
Ciao
-
Always black background when programming! I guess old habits (MVS and AS/400) die hard!
-
I have found that as a developer staring at a screen for 7 or 8 hours at a time for the last 27 years that a black backgound for visual studio and SQL Server reduced my gritty eyes iritation and enabled a better contrast selection for colour coding the code.
-
Working on a Unix system in the past for 8 years, I always used a blue background with white text. I found this quite easy on the eye. Might give the black background a try in SQL and VS.
-
I prefer to use pastel colours that are light, instead of white. I use a medium-light pink on VS (nice contrast to the colour coding too), and and eggshell on this browser using a stylesheet.
I find looking at white writing on black difficult - when i look away from the screen I can still see the writing!
White is too much strain for the pies, but black ain't no better!
-
At my age, I find light letters on black much easier to read.
But framing this as an 'energy' issue is just one more exercise in absurdity.like so many other 'feel good' ideas, the numbers sound big when multiplied way out, but in reality are so small as to be completely immeasurable in the background noise of daily energy use.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
-
I think that black background should be more easy for the brain to look at since no color is sent to the eyes. White color contains all frequencies (all colors) and our brain catch each of them and summarize them. I guess we would have less headaches or eye problems if we would use always black background...
Maybe there was some tests or experimentation on that, but I did not search on that
David
-
I tend to use black text on a white background. I used to program on my Apple //c with its black background and green text and didn't mind it though. I basically just accept the defaults of whatever program I'm using, it doesn't really matter to me.
-
The reason I find black letters harder to read, is that when there is a small visual bleeding of light (dirty glasses, fatigue etc, smearig of white tends to partially obliterate the black, whereas when light smears from the white characters, it only spills on the background and the central character is not lost.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
-
When it comes to gaming, dark backgrounds work better - maybe it's from all those old-style arcade games like Pong and Space Invaders and Pacman. Otherwise, I prefer a light background and dark text. My VS2005 currently has a light green background at the moment, but that changes with my mood.
-
Colors like White, Cyan, Magenta, Light Green and Yellow show up very well on a dark Blue background. Font and font size can also make a huge difference in Readability. I have been using these colors for years to avoid eye strain.
VS2005 and SQL Server Mgmt Studio allow you to customize colors like crazy. I have different colors set up for strings, keywords, comments, highlighted code etc. etc. etc.
-
Light Grey Back ground and black text is my set up. I sometime’s have severe light sensitivity with my eyes and I’ve found that when I work on white back grounds with black text or even on black back grounds with white text I get horrible headaches. So I got rid of the white all together and I don't have any more headaches.
As for Blackle while I have no idea about the science behind saving energy several years ago I read some research on web page layouts and design that showed people who view pages with to much white space get tired more easily and report the pages as boring and hard to navigate. While the same exact page layouts with a light grey or light blue back ground were reported as interesting and easy to use. After discussing it with team I was on we decided to change the back ground color of our company’s intra web site from white to a blue grey. The “I can’t find what I need” and “this site is useless” complaints went down by half in less than a week.
Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 32 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply