[Stratoscope]

This looks very cool! I especially like the geographical stuff, that being something that is dear to my heart.

I have a couple of questions that may sound trivial but are important to me. I haven't tried installing the studio yet, so please forgive me if installing it would answer these.

First, all the screenshots, along with the doc pages, use a dark theme with very low contrast: only 47% contrast on the body copy in the docs, and much of the text in the screenshots has even less contrast than that.

I know that low contrast dark themes are very popular, but younger developers are often unaware that they can become very hard to read as you get older or if you have less than perfect vision.

There's even been some research done on this; I don't have the source handy right now, but the basic idea is that dark themes cause your eyes' irises to open up wide, while light themes cause them to "stop down" with a narrower opening. And like a camera lens, many people's eyes can focus more sharply when they are stopped down a bit.

There is also the problem of switching back and forth between light and dark backgrounds. All of the web references I use day to day have light backgrounds; all my editors are set to light backgrounds, basically everything I do is that way because I find it much easier to see things. Switching back and forth to one app that uses a dark theme is hard on the eyes.

I did find the PDF version of the docs, and that uses a conventional high contrast light theme, so that is nice.

Somewhat less important, I'm curious whether the studio supports proportional fonts? I don't enjoy monospaced fonts and I find them harder to read than proportional fonts. This is not a big problem like the dark theme, but it would be nice to support any choice of font.

I should file GitHub issues on these, of course. Partly I just wanted to mention them here to help raise awareness among other developers that dark, low contrast themes can be a real accessibility issue for some of us.

Thanks, and I look forward to checking this out!

[singingboyo]

OT: Do dark but high-contrast themes have the same issues?

I ask because, just to reduce eye strain in the other direction, I avoid bright screens where possible. Probably a side effect of often doing things late or even at normal times during winter. In any case, if I ever built a website it'd probably be dark-ish, but knowing about the pitfalls might help avoid them.

Even more off-topic, but in the interest of eyesight stuff - both switching between light/dark and dealing with bright screens have been basically unnoticeable since getting blue-filter coating on my glasses. Not sure I'd recommend it for color-sensitive work, but it's not problematic at all for programming and stuff like that.

[Stratoscope]

Your comment about the blue filter got me thinking. I assume this filter reduces the amount of blue light, is that correct?

As I mentioned in another comment, I've found that many laptop screens have a pronounced blue-green cast out of the box. The worst ones we have here are a late 2013 MacBook Pro Retina and a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2 WQHD. These both are difficult to look at with the factory calibration, especially the X1 Yoga which I found literally painful to use in the first part of the Windows setup, before calibrating the display. Everything was an intense green that felt like it was burning my eyes. I can see why someone using a display like that might prefer a dark theme, just to knock out that awful blue-green.

But after I calibrated the display to a pure white, it looked beautiful, just like our other calibrated high-DPI displays.

One other benefit to calibrating displays is when using multiple displays. I use a 24" 4K/UHD display in portrait mode along with whichever laptop I'm using at the moment. (A portrait mode display plus a landscape display is a wonderful combination, for example an entire PDF page fits on the portrait display with no scrolling.) Having the colors look the same on both displays - especially the white backgrounds - makes things much more pleasing to the eye.

To your question about high-contrast dark themes, yes, I have the same trouble with those. Dark themes just don't work for me, nor do low-contract themes, whether dark or light.

[wdanilo]

@Stratoscope thank you for such a detailed comment. We are fully aware of the topics you've mentioned. I'll try to cover all your questions in the following points: 1. Screenshot contrasts – we will be working on providing setting desired contrast in Luna just by selecting a predefined one from a drop-down menu. We are not there yet, because to make it working properly it is a little tricky thing. However, please keep in mind that the visual part of Luna is one of the most important parts of the whole projects to us (and for me personally). Right now we provide a "default" dark setting, that is suitable for working long hours in Luna without making your eyes tired (please note that we do not use gray, we use red-ish color scheme there).

2. We know that such settings are not the best for everyone, especially for developers older than about 40 years. We would our best to provide appropriate settings, so you can either increase the contrast or change the theme to white one (or write your custom theme from scratch). In fact, if you navigate right now to our theme settings you can already see some contrast settings. They do not work properly yet, but you can see that we are slowly working in that direction. However, we do not want to just "increase the contrast". There is a lot of people who prefer lower contrast, as we ship right now. We want to do it the right way, so you will have control and will be able to easily fine tune the GUI to your preferences.

3.I've read the research you mention. It states in particular, that when your irises are more closed, it is much easier for you to track corners and edges, however your eyes are getting tired easier. Working with white theme a whole day could be a pain, so we started with default dark theme. It is also affected by our personal preference, but as I described above, it is VERY important to us to make Luna easy to work with for everybody in all conditions, which also includes white, high-contrast themes. Please, keep in mind that it will need some time to develop. We are still a small team and we've got some high-priority things on our checklist right now, like improving the typechecking performance.

4. Our docs provide white PDF, but also the HTML version provides a white theme - just click on the "A" latter icon on top of the docs and switch to the light theme there! :)

5. Proportional fonts are a little tricky by definition. The question is - if you really want to use them when writing code. What I mean is that what you write above ndoes could be any code snippet. It could be just a function name, but could also be any expression like `2+2`. We are currently synchronizing the text editor font with nodes font, so if you use monospaced font in your editor, the same font will appear above the nodes. Do you think it is a wrong approach? If so, how would you change it? The best way to tell us about it is to create a github issue / discussion about it.

6. As I described above, we are small team of developers on a mission to bring something incredible for data processing. We are very open for any improvement suggestions. Any suggestsion regarding how the GUI looks like and how readible it is, is very, very important to us. This topic is tricky, because we want to provide flexibility over how the GUI looks like. We would be also very thankful for any help on helping us improve it. So if you tell more about what you think on github issues, we can continue the disusion there. We will tell you in detail what are our ideas and we could then choose the one that is the best (allowing everyone to set up the theme for hes own preferences).

Thank you once again and im looking forward to hearing from you! :)

[Stratoscope]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I will hop over to the GitHub issues for more detailed discussion. A few thoughts in the meantime...

I tried the A icon in the docs - thanks for pointing this out, I didn't notice it at first. The light theme is an improvement over the dark one, but it isn't very readable either. The problem is that nasty Quicksand font. It is very hard to read! I knocked it out and the page fell back to Helvetica Neue, which is much easier to read. The line-height: 1.7 seems a bit excessive too, but that is a minor thing.

I'm viewing the page in Chrome on Windows 10 with displays in the neighborhood of 200 DPI and display scaling set to 225%.

> Working with white theme a whole day could be a pain

It certainly isn't for me. I use light themes for everything - all my editors and other tools, all websites, everything.

I wonder if the idea of light themes causing eye strain may come from having improperly calibrated displays? I calibrate all my displays to a pure white background. This is essential for me, since most laptop displays I've used have a pronounced blue-green tint. The worst one was a ThinkPad Yoga Gen 2 WQHD that I helped a friend set up. Out of the box, the display had an intense green cast and was truly painful to look at. After I calibrated the display it was a pleasure to use.

I did try installing Studio on Windows after I wrote my first message. The darkness and lack of contrast in the installer made it feel a bit sad, as if it didn't really want me to see what it had to say. Alas, the installer got stuck at 34% with no files installed, so I didn't get a chance to try the actual app yet. I will revisit that when I get some time.

Of course this whole area is one where different people will feel differently - you guys love the current theme, where I find it very unusable. So I'm glad to hear that customizable themes are in the works, because I would have a hard time with the current one.

Regarding proportional fonts, yes, I use them for all of my coding, and have done so for at least 10-15 years. In particular, proportional fonts let me use a larger font size and still fit more text on the screen than I could with a smaller monospaced font.

I don't use monospaced fonts at all any more except for specialized situations like hex dumps. All of the editors and tools I use support proportional fonts beautifully. So my advice on fonts is simple: don't assume that proportional fonts are unusable for coding and development; give them the same support as monospaced fonts.

Looking at the animated screenshots, I don't see much there that would have any difficulty with a proportional font. The one possible exception is some right-aligned text. If you use spaces to line that text up, it won't work well in a proportional font. But if you use truly right-aligned text it will be fine.