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
