Darkness

Dark themes for Google, Facebook and more

2 followers

Dark themes for Google, Facebook and more

2 followers

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Web browsers

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Background removal tools

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Chrome Extensions

Darkness is a Chrome extension that provides dark themes for popular websites

Launch tags:Web App•Chrome Extensions•Tech

Launch Team

Competely

Maker

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

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10yr ago

@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 :)

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10yr ago

Competely

Maker

@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

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10yr ago

Trackr

@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!

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10yr ago

Competely

Maker

@srikarg_ Great suggestion, will definitely consider it going forward.

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10yr ago

@liorgrossman Thanks for this. Can I use it on Firefox as well?

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10yr ago

@liorgrossman How does Darkness compare to the Stylish plugin? Did you consider their approach of letting any interested designer develop CSS packages?

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10yr ago

Competely

Maker

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.

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10yr ago

Competely

Maker

@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.

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10yr ago

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...

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10yr ago

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Maker

@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.

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10yr ago

@liorgrossman Cheers :) Keep me posted! Btw, where can I follow you for updates? Do you have a newsletter?

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10yr ago

Competely

Maker

@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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10yr ago

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.

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10yr ago

Competely

Maker

@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?

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10yr ago

@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.

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10yr ago

@liorgrossman Giving it another go, by the way. :-)

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10yr ago

Competely

Maker

@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?)

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10yr ago

Competely

Maker

@frassmith Woohoo, glad to hear you're giving it another go!

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10yr ago