Lior, the creator of Darkness here.
Darkness was created as a result of my personal pain (literally pain - I mean it).
Working 15 hours a days in front of a computer screen, I found that prolonged and repetitive use of bright websites cause eye strain and fatigue.
While a lot of software has the ability to switch from bright to dark themes, most big websites don't.
That's why I created "Darkness" - allowing you to "darken" your websites. It currently supports Facebook, Google, YouTube*, and Gmail* and more to come soon.
Darkenss significantly reduces eye strain and fatigue, and eliminates the annoying bright glare at night.
As opposed to simply inverting all website colors, which often looks ugly, I've decided to work with designers to professionally skin the websites.
I hope you'll enjoy Darkness as much as I do. I'd be happy to answer your questions, please reply below!
Come to the dark side,
Lior Grossman
@liorgrossman Hey, it's really looks great. However, I could only use it on Google and Facebook. I understand that a "man gotta eat" but paying 5$ seems very steep to get 2 more site especially when there are 1000 more sites that you could add. I believe that getting 10+ sites for free and paying 5$ to get 100+ more seems more reasonable. But hey, that is just my opinion. Nevertheless, you got my upvote :)
@rotemthegolfer Thanks for the feedback! 100% fair point.
Developing Darkness is challenging, since a designer has to work for a few days to skin each any every website (unlike some other solutions, we're not inverting the website's colors, but we build hand-crafted unique CSS for each website).
Therefore, offering Darkness for 100+ websites seems unlikely at the moment, and it would take years (unless we go for a Kickstarter project).
We do intend, however, to skin more websites by popular demand. Several users already expressed their interest in Darkness for Redit, Google Docs, and even the New Tab page.
This will not happen in one day, though, but will happen gradually as Darkness grows and we can generate enough revenue ($5 is not a lot, and the vast majority of our users are free users) to afford skinning more and more websites.
Best,
Lior
@liorgrossman Perhaps you can open source the extension's CSS skin files so other developers can help you enable this extension on different websites. I would love to help out if you did this!
I tried this a couple of weeks ago. While it isn't for me (I have eye issues that make looking at bright text against a dark background difficult) I can say that this is very well done and well worth a look. As for me, it's back to f.lux for my night time reading.
@frassmith Thank you for the kind feedback Fraser.
Anything we can do to make Darkness better? Maybe a different color scheme for different types of eye issues / visual impairments?
@liorgrossman Good question because, I always use a dark theme in my editor while I'm working. I guess it's more an issue with the contrast rather than darkness per-se.
For example, my daily driver for code editing is Visual Studio Code and in recent weeks I seem to have settled on (get the irony) the Facebook theme. which has text in varying shades of blue against a dark background.
It's really bright pinpoints of light (e.g. characters) that seem to work badly with my wonky eyes.
@frassmith LOL - Facebook theme for code editing... that's a first :)
So, let me see if I understand, you prefer theme with a dark background, and lower contrast? (so that characters aren't so brightly lid?)
@yesnoornext Thank you Vincent! Yeah, it resembles Blackle indeed.
On the one hand, Blackle doesn't requires you to install any extension, which is pretty cool.
On the other hand, Blackle uses Google Custom search, which is less powerful. Darkness provides dark theme for the "original" Google search, allowing you to enjoy the full power of Google: Video, News and Map search, Advanced search, immediate answers and definitions from Google (aka Knowledge Graph / Vault).
@vadimzak Thanks Vadim, glad to hear that!
We plan on skinning the leading social networks and messengers (e.g. Reddit, Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp) as well as some Google tools (Google Calendar, Google Drive/Docs, etc). This will be done gradually, of course.
We're always open for suggestions, though!
@ddulic92 Hi Damir, thank you!
You can disable Darkness on certain websites. Just click the moon icon in the top right corner of the website, and under "Theme" select "None".
@ddulic92 Currently the only way to pay is via Google Payment.
I'm not sure what's wrong with preview mode, could you please hit the "Send a feedback" button in the app, and attach a screenshot?
@liorgrossman How does Darkness compare to the Stylish plugin? Did you consider their approach of letting any interested designer develop CSS packages?
Using Stylish with different stylesheets for different websites is fair solution. I think Darkness has several advantages: 1. Consistency - using the same theme across multiple websites. 2. Maintainability - the vast majority of styles in UserStyles were abandoned years ago, which means they don't work anymore. Maintaining styles require work as websites change often. Darkness employs a freemium model to make sure we can keep maintaining the styles on the long run. 3. Simplicity - Darkness just works out of the box, no need to search, install and try different styles to see if they function correctly.
@arsblog As for your second question - I didn't originally thought about letting interested developers design CSS packages since I wanted to keep things simple, but several people has suggested that I open this to external designers, so this is something I will consider.
@dmgrossblatt No problem David. Interesting article (with a clickbait title, to be expected). I personally found that it does help with the transition to sleep at night. I went on and changed all my other apps (Kindle on iPad and various readers on phone) to a dark theme. Using a bright screen at night not only causes eye strain, but also affect sleep patterns.
@phippuuuu Hi Philipp, thanks for your feedback.
It's indeed much easier technically to convert the colors of a website, but it looks horrible (and largely unexpected). See this for example:
https://lh4.googleusercontent.co...
That's why we've decided to build custom themes by designers, as opposed to inverting all colors.
Neat! I just installed the extension. Is there some way to preview how the websites looks like with premium version while navigating the page? One idea could be to implement a timer that allows the user to use and demo a theme for a set amount of time, the watermarks could still be present. After the time is up the user is prompted to buy the premium feature. Might increase conversion? Cheers!
Edit:
Please also consider adding support to the evernote extension, if possible :)
Demo: http://ohlsson.link/DarkTheme_Ev...
Edit 2:
Please consider also adding support for Imagus, it seems as if Imagus images becomes inverted with Darkness turned on. Demo: http://ohlsson.link/DarknessBrea...
@kevinohlsson Thanks for the feedback. Will definitely consider that.
Re. Imagus - we tried to add support but it's not trivial technically since Imagus doesn't identify well (with CSS classes or IDs).
Re. Evenrnote - noted.
@kevinohlsson Cheers mate. Unfortunately, currently there's still no newsletter / Twitter / Facebook page. Easiest way right now would be to follow / befriend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liorgro...
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