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The clarity of his explanation isn't the problem, the problem is it just doesn't make sense to me. Don't use black because it's not natural? Neither is a computer screen, or most of the things displayed on it. (Ever see a Start bar wandering around on it's own, detached from a computer? Not likely.) Especially when his example is the work of a single painter, who is painting scenes that can be found in the real world. It's apples and oranges.
modified 10-Aug-12 10:05am.
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Well it does make sense. Perhaps a screen is not natural, but your eyes and your brains are, so the designer should attempt to design things such that they are pleasant and easy on the eye and brain. The screen is just a medium, it could just as well be paper, T-shirt, or a painting as the author showed. In painting using blue in shadows is actually very common, it is not just this one painter that does this. Just that one example is shown, doesn't mean other painters do not do this. The reason they do this is that there is actually more blue in shadows. This is because the sky is blue, and where direct sunlight doesn't hit a spot, the blue light from the sky will.
There's nothing against using high contrasting bright colors at the extreme ends of the spectrum, but it will tire the eye and brain. His way of picking optimal brightness/saturation values is quite intelligent. Going to either 0% or 100% would be very unsubtle. Things on the screen may not be natural things, but still they go through your eye and brain, and you can't get around how they work. E.g. sharp edges are less pleasant to look at than round edges. Sharp objects can possibly hurt you, so there is special circuitry in the brain to detect that. Bright high contrasting colored animals are usually very dangerous or poisonous.
Also most people don't have the brightness + contrast settings on a screen at 100%. Might be pretty to look at for perhaps 2 minutes, but after an hour your eyes would start to burn.
Wout
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wout de zeeuw wrote: Just that one example is shown, doesn't mean other painters do not do this. The reason they do this is that there is actually more blue in shadows. This is because the sky is blue, and where direct sunlight doesn't hit a spot, the blue light from the sky will.
The number of painters wasn't my point. How many computer screens are lit primarily by the sun & sky? It makes sense when painting a landscape or some other natural model, but again computers are not. Instead of trying to hide the differences by pretending one is the other, the uniqueness of the virtual environment should be embraced and utilized, not hidden away.
Also, even darker blacks can be found in nature. Have you ever been deep inside a cave system, where the sun doesn't reach, and turned off all artificial lights? That's much blacker than a computer screen will ever be (mostly because of the back light).
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Quote: lewax00 wrote: <layer>The number of painters wasn't my point.
It does appear so from:
Quote: Quote: Especially when his example is the work of a single painter
Hence the reaction about it not being one single painter's creation, but a general natural phenomenon.
Quote: lewax00 wrote: How many computer screens are lit primarily by the sun & sky?
The author is using examples to clarify a more general observation about how the brain interprets color. The point the author was trying to make, even when you think you're seeing black, or seeing gray, it is almost never a pure black or gray. So when making a design, the objective is using a generally color scheme to get a particular effect (e.g. appearing gray). He quite clearly demonstrates with examples how far you can deviate from pure greys while your brain still thinks the color is grey. So even when designing a grey theme it wouldn't be necessarily a good idea to limit oneself to the pure black and greys (just like painters do).
lewax00 wrote: Instead of trying to hide the differences by pretending one is the other, the uniqueness of the virtual environment should be embraced and utilized, not hidden away.
I don't see where the author is hiding or underutilizing color. He is doing quite the opposite, through understanding of perception of color he is intelligently choosing appropriate colors to achieve a certain effect, rather than limiting himself to pure black and greys.
Wout
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wout de zeeuw wrote: I don't see where the author is hiding or underutilizing color.
The title is "Design Tip: Never Use Black". Never. Not "avoid it in certain cases", not "use it when it's appropriate", but "never". He's saying to avoid using a section of the color space on computers simply because it isn't as natural as other choices. And I don't think that's correct. I'm not saying black is right for everything, but it does have very appropriate uses in a virtual environment.
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Apart from the word Tip suggestsing it's a guideline, the intention of the author is clearly to educate about the subtleties of black and greys. If you're going to take things very literal, never in the whole article he states to not use black because black is not natural. One of the things states is that pure black is very overpowering, but even then he does not conclude to not use it because of that. He merely states what effect a pure black has, and suggests that you take all this into consideration and make a choice based on that, as he summarizes at the bottom:
Quote: Bottom line is: when you find #000000 in your color picker, ask yourself if you really want pure black. You’re probably better off with something more natural. And if you’re feeling adventurous, try staying away from the left edge of the color picker altogether.
Wout
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OK. But the (not so) recent trend to display light grey text on a white background is disturbing. I wonder how many of these self-professed designers actually spend hours reading content styled this way. 
I don't care if it's black or white. But I care deeply that it's easy to consume.
/ravi
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It's true: some of the countertrends can be just as bad as the practices they're trying to replace. I still use the Readability bookmarklet far more than I ought to considering the design resources available to web developers today.
I think in our excitement to move beyond paper, we've forgotten so many lessons learned from nearly 500 years of printing. Readability is a solved problem (allowing for individual reader preferences). Printed pages are rarely true black on true white. Black and white on screen can be tiring to read (maybe it's just my aging, overworked eyes), but yes, often better than gray on tan.
Then there are elements like font proportions, line length and line spacing that make a huge difference and yet rarely get the attention they deserve.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Printed pages are rarely true black on true white.
If you're talking about popular media. 
But I've yet to find a book (paperback, hardcover, technical, non-technical) that is not black on some shade of white. Usability studies have shown that Tappi 100 whiteness is harsh on the eyes, which is why most book manufacturers scale down a tad. Also, almost all printed publications use non-acid-free paper which causes them to yellow with age.
/ravi
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Whoever wrote this article never saw the optical illusion where just having a light shine on black area next to an area that does not have a light on it make the black look white. Grey will look like the black if there is nothing to compare it to. Is he saying do not use gray either. Then maybe we should not use white. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_illusion[^]. The top illustration shows this.
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In "The Art of Science Fiction", Frank Kelly Freas (the creator of Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman) wrote about how he had to paint a black man (alien) for Clifford B. Simak's "The Big Front Yard":
"In the original, the skin tones are a bit more subtle, but the color is BLACK: not brown, or purple, or chocolate, but black -- and astonishingly tricky to paint."
m.bergman
For Bruce Schneier, quanta only have one state : afraid.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. -- Voltaire
In most cases the only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment. -- Marc Maron
I am not a chatbot
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One of the most significant early personal computers, the Commodore 64, went on sale in August 30 years ago. For many people, this machine was their introduction to personal computing, and for two members of the Ars staff, thinking about the machine brings up strong memories. For me, stepping up tp the Commodore 64 from my TI-99/4A was a quantum leap forward in computing. The multimedia experience alone was worth the price of admission—incredible graphics and sound that seemed light years ahead of the market. Then there were the games. From arcade knock-offs to innovative 2-player experiences, you never got bored with the c64. What are your fond memories of the C64?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: What are your fond memories of the C64?
I have to say, learning to program on it. Plenty of fun experiences with it
I do still have my old Compute! magazines boxed away some where around here.
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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Would have to be the games Wolfenstein, Phantasie, and IK+[^].
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It was October 4th, 1957. Scientists at MIT noticed that the frequency of the radio signals transmitted by the small Russian satellite increased as it approached and decreased as it moved away. This was caused by the Doppler Effect, the same things that makes the timbre of a car horn change as the car rushes by. This gave the scientists a grand idea. Satellites could be tracked from the ground by measuring the frequency of the radio signals they emitted, and conversely, the locations of receivers on the ground could be tracked by their relative distance from the satellites. That, in a nutshell, is the conceptual foundation of modern GPS. You are here.
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Narrative is this crazy itch we all want scratched – if you think back to the last speech, song or standup routine that really grabbed your attention, chances are good that it told a story. This very human craving is something we try to feed on our developer evangelism team here at Twilio. But, I’ll be the first to admit, constructing a narrative out of code is damn tough. It was a dark and stormy codebase...
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The long-delayed TextMate 2 text editor for Mac has been open-sourced under the GPL 3 license, says its creator Allan Odgaard. The editor, after being announced years ago, was released as an alpha in December of last year. Now, the app has been open sourced, which has led a lot of folks to immediately predict its death by disinterest, at least in terms of official development. I've embraced Sublime Text. What's your favorite editor?
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All I had to do is write software to tell the modem to dial over and over and try different combinations. Because I was a self-taught programmer, this was no problem. But because I was an overachieving self-taught programmer, I didn't just write a program. No, I went off and built a full-blown toolkit in AppleBasic, with complete documentation and the best possible text user interface I could muster, and then uploaded it to my favorite BBSes so every other addict could get their online modem fix, too. I called it The Hacking Construction Set, and I spent months building it. Using my own software got me in trouble with the law. And deservedly so.
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Agile development isn't just for software anymore. Even NPR is using it to develop programs like TED Radio Hour [ITworld]
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One Methodology to rule them all, One Methodology to find them,
One Methodology to bring them all and in Scrum bind them.
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In this installment we talk to Vanessa Hurst, founder of Developers for Good, co-founder of Girl Develop It!, and a consultant and advisor to startups. Our continuing series in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves.
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In a significant divergence from traditional fault-tolerance approaches, ROC emphasizes recovery from failures rather than failure-avoidance. This philosophy is motivated by the observation that even the most robust systems still occasionally encounter failures due to human operator error, transient or permanent hardware failure, and software anomalies resulting from "Heisenbugs" or software aging. Fixing Murphy's Law.
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Let's say you have a large computer system and you want to measure it for performance or efficiency. You want metrics. You want pretty pictures that tell you what's going on. You start looking at graphing libraries and databases. I think this is exactly backward. You have to start with measurement. It's shockingly easy to fool yourself and you really have to get it right. Bad data looks very much like useful data and it's worse than having no data at all. Understanding the difference between measurements and metrics.
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Windows 8 apps can be designed and coded using HTML/CSS/JS just like PhoneGap apps can. And with very little effort you can use your skill and existing resources to crank out a sleek, modern looking Windows 8 style app in no time. PhoneGap and Windows 8 development – more similar than you realize.
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After the hacking of a former Gizmodo writer’s Apple account, a lot of discussion has been going on concerning turning on two-factor authentication on services like Google Apps. I absolutely recommend doing so, but I also think that’s not enough. A good majority of the people who read this blog are creators of webapps of some description. It’s time for us to start building two-factor authentication into our products. 7 well-documented methods of implementing two-factor authentication.
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