Universal dark mode in the ArcGIS Enterprise ecosystem support

GuusKlaas1 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 08:22:51 GMT

I recently acquired a new laptop, and with that, my final truely back-lit machine went the way of the dodo: everything I have now is either OLED, or mini-LED >WITH< HDR support.

The fun thing is, that HDR is both great, but for ArcGIS a curse: it's an SDR app, which means it can't suggest brightness for a light colour, which basically means: light becomes LIGHT. Like: "The beacons have been lit, Gondor calls for aid".

As a systems design-like person who also spends a lot of his time in IDE's and his own ArcGIS Pro stuff, or dark-mode remote CLI's, that is perfectly fine, but on occasion I have to open up ArcGIS Enterprise, or some old piece of content in ArcGIS Pro, and suddenly get blinded.

I am a dark mode user, and keeping in that notion is a fight I'm willing to go to extremes in, but I think with the new trend in screens, dark mode is a big deal: it's such a big deal, it's a basic javascript function now to just... detect system themes, which is supported on iOS, Android, Windows/Linux/MacOS Chromium ánd Firefox:

if (window.matchMedia && window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)').matches) {
    // dark mode
}

ArcGIS Enterprise however, doesn't support it (yet!). I'd really love it to be a feature, and ALSO be a complete feature:

Not just the apps, themes, and tools should have a dark mode theme to go with it, but ideally we should also allow organisation themes to be altered between dark and light mode; so we can customise our corporate branding to "match" in dark mode: my company recently came with marketing/branding/UI design guidelines including logo's for a dark mode use-case
We should be able to link basemaps or basemap-styles to dark- and light mode, so we can ensure we have the basemap also change on device/application theme change
Ideally we'd also be able to provide multiple theme-specific symbologies so our layers could also adjust with said basemap changes.

I think the aspect of choice is a huge part of freedom, and with how engrained dark/light mode has become on OS levels, to the level that with a self-emissive screen using a mode can be an energy saving policy, this would be the flexibility level that could truely benefit the entire ArcGIS Platform

idea Universal dark mode in the ArcGIS Enterprise ecosystem support in ArcGIS Enterprise Ideas

Universal dark mode in the ArcGIS Enterprise ecosystem support