 Dark mode has swept over the internet like a dark gray tidal wave with hints of dark blue. Nowadays, whether you're on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, or basically anything else, even our forum, there's probably some sort of option to change the color scheme to match the black void in your soul. But is it really possible to dark mode every aspect of your digital life? And why would you want to? We're gonna let you know. Right after I tell you about Memory Express. Memory Express' Victoria BC location is now open and offers the same product selection and quality of service as their other stores. Check out the link below to learn more. A huge reason that people use dark mode is because they say that reading white text on a dark background is easier on the eyes. And this is especially true at night when the ambient light is low. But that subjective analysis actually goes against a lot of the conventional wisdom. For years, monitor manufacturers have boasted of brighter and brighter displays. And according to both traditional UI design guidelines and studies that rate the readability of various combinations of text and background colors, dark text on a white background is still the number one most readable configuration. And indeed, as humans spend more and more of their time staring at screens, it has become apparent that the conventional wisdom isn't always the best thing for our eyes. Scientists are now studying new conditions like digital eye strain and computer vision syndrome, finding that large amounts of time spent looking at screens can contribute to sleeplessness, headaches, dry eyes and blurred vision. And other studies have found that reading black text on a white background can even contribute to increased myopia, AKA nearsightedness. So then, on to ways to lessen the strain on your eyes. Now one way is called night mode. And this is usually a setting on your monitor or on your device that attempts to filter out or reduce the blue light that your screen is emitting, making it less likely to disrupt your circadian rhythm, causing you to unintentionally spend the whole night going down a Wikipedia black hole. But night mode is different from dark mode. Dark mode is not a filter so much as it's a color scheme or a theme that can be applied either to a specific application or in some cases, even system-wide. So what this means is that while it can improve comfort, it doesn't necessarily have the sleep benefits of night mode. And in brightly lit environments, it can actually strain your eyes in exactly the same way that a bright screen can in a dark room. Also, with dark mode, the implementation depends heavily on the developer and not all dark modes are made equal. Okay then, so you're ready to take the plunge and dark mode your life. Let's start with Windows 10. Windows has actually had theme support for a very long time. Does anyone else remember window blinds? No? Oh, bummer. Anyway, now there's a handy option right in the color settings to switch to the dark default app mode. This will make built-in Windows apps like settings, calculator and alarms almost fully black. Now it might also automatically apply to photos, movies and groove music, but if it doesn't, you can go into those app settings and switch it on manually. File Explorer still doesn't have dark mode support. So you can expect sudden retina searing light if you dare to browse C, but that is supposed to be coming in the October update. So Microsoft does still have some work to do, but if you don't like the built-in dark mode, they also have the option for you to customize Windows's high contrast settings to basically create your own. But even what I said just now, assuming it all goes perfectly is only the built-in Microsoft apps. I mean, who spends their whole day using those? What about the one app that people probably use the most? Their web browser. Well, Edge and Firefox both have built-in dark themes. And while there is no official dark mode for Chrome, the browser's theme and extension support mean that you can essentially kind of tack one on. So there's a category page for dark themes in the Chrome Web Store, and popular ones include Material Incognito Dark and Morpheon Dark with the former being our pick. But a theme just changes the toolbar. Websites are still gonna present themselves normally. So some more tweaking is required. Now a lot of websites have built-in dark modes, including Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Linus Tech Tips Forum, and Gmail's inbox, actually. Although, curiously for that last one, daring to actually open an email will still blind you. As for the rest of the web, you can install the Dark Reader extension, which is also available for Firefox and Safari on macOS. It analyzes colors and tries to make web pages look like an official dark mode with some settings available for customization as well. It solves Gmail's dark mode problem, but it can also cause some glitchiness and delayed loading at times. Thankfully, you can actually teach it to enable or disable itself automatically site by site. Now onto another popular app, Microsoft Office. There is an official dark mode or dark theme found in the settings, but it sucks. It doesn't affect the actual page color. You will have to go to design, then page color for that. And if you dare to make comments, add markups to a page, or try to highlight anything, you will quickly discover some of its many flaws. If you're a macOS user, well, you no doubt already know about Mojave's dark mode. It's got a number of customization options and it affects all of the OS's built-in apps. Then for everything else, the handy website dark mode list has a directory of a ton of macOS apps that support dark mode. Also, if you install a third party app like Night Owl or Shifty, you can customize and even automate dark modes to turn on and off depending on the time of day. iOS is where things start to get really interesting though. So Apple added a feature in the iOS accessibility settings called smart invert colors, which does exactly what it sounds like. It inverts the colors in every app, but it also analyzes the screen to skip over stuff like icons and images. The result is something that's actually pretty dang close to a true system-wide dark mode. Although you might not like the way that it makes some apps look, like Google Maps. Fortunately, Apple thought of that and you can assign the mode to turn on or off when you triple click the power button. Pretty awesome. What is not quite as awesome is Android's implementation of dark mode. Now Google finally added a dark mode option, but it only affects quick settings, the app drawer, and maybe the contacts and phone app. Notifications and the full settings app remain light, which is pretty irritating. You can change individual apps to dark mode, phone, messages, YouTube, news maps, that is in navigation mode, Google Play games, authenticator, Gboard, and the Google discover feed, but your mileage may vary. That is still not working on Riley's Pixel. Now Android does have an invert colors option, but it literally just inverts the colors with no post-processing to preserve images. So it really sucks. There is the substratum engine, an app that enables more robust theming support, but it requires that you root your device on all versions of Android except Oreo. So obviously there are some trade-offs with dark mode, not the least of which being that from a UI design standpoint, it is more difficult to make it look good. And there's still work to be done to the point where I could see people just opting not to bother if it's gonna be this much of a hassle. But aside from everything we've talked about so far with respect to improved comfort, there are some other benefits as well. So for example, if you're on a mobile device, you could actually realize measurable battery savings. At their Android dev summit, Google said that using dark mode in the YouTube app on an OLED screen could reduce your battery usage by as much as 40%. Though it should be noted that this was at maximum brightness. Oh, I guess Riley didn't write an outro for this. I guess that wasn't the maximum brightest idea. Ha, ha, ha. Oh yeah, it's a good thing I have a writing staff. Speaking of staff, if you wield your staff in RPG games and also stream them online, you might wanna pick up an Elgato Stream Deck. It allows you to concentrate on your stream instead of trying to memorize keyboard shortcuts. One touch operations allow you to start your stream, announce your live, play animations and more without ever taking your eyes off the action. With a total of six LCD keys that can be customized for any action and have the graphics on them changed cause they're all little screens, it's not just for streamers. I mean, Taron actually has two of the stream decks at his desk cause he loves his macros for Adobe Premier. It's not hard to remember which key does what because they're all little screens. It's available for Mac or Windows. It's less than a hundred US dollars and you can check it out now at Amazon and Newegg at the link below. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store which has been recently overhauled. Go check it out, to have shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join and then enable dark mode on.