Poll: Eyestrain and the Apple look

[Joe Paolo]

Usually the content or the producer give me a headache before the interface does.

joe

[Bob Cole]

[CharlieX2] “Anyone else? Or do I need to go outside more often”

Cheers to you for bringing this up. I agree. Not just Apple but many software designers provide icons and fonts that are too small. The little drop-down arrows on the FCP browser bins can take a couple tries to hit just right.

otoh, some companies get it — e.g., Firefox, my browser of choice, enables you to enlarge the font size of a web page quickly and easily.

And… you DO need to go outside more.

— Bob C

[Bret Williams]

I think it was established centuries ago that dark text on a light background is infinitely easier to look at than the opposite. Which is why 99% of what you see reflects that.

But I don’t get the eyestrain issue. What is it you’re reading anyway? Maybe I read a TC here and there, but most of the time I’m looking at large moving images called video.

Didn’t they add a feature to make the text huge with 5.1? Seems like I saw that somewhere. But I keep it small myself.

[Aaron Neitz]

I would REALLY like a way to adjust the interface colors…. instead of trying to see the dark scratches with a bloom of light around them, I want to see the pertinent info the one emitting light. It’s like looking at a light bulb that’s turned on to see the wattage decal.

you can invert everything with Universal Access… and it looks a little more like the greys of Avid… but it obviously inverts EVERYTHING which makes it useless.

[Aaron Neitz]

Really? That’s what those large moving images are: video?

[Bob Cole]

[Bret Williams] “Didn’t they add a feature to make the text huge with 5.1”

Thanks — you are so right: User Pref’s – General Tab.

But the browser’s little arrows still require precise positioning to open them successfully.

Dark on light is easier to read. That was one of the things that first set the earliest Mac’s apart — they were the first computers I saw that offered dark text on a light bg.

— Bob C

[Jonathan White]

I completely agree, I spent years working on Avid Liquid (back in the day when it was FAST 601!!) and I still miss the interface. Of course I couldn’t do 1/10th of what I do now with FCP. Surely it’s a simple thing to provide users with a few colour options???

Johnny

[Matt Callac]

It could be that the lighting in your suite is very dim (much as mine is) so it creates more eye strain while focusing on this much brighter light. I’d like to darken up my FCP interface a bit as well. Hopefully they’ll add that feature soon. Didn’t it take AE till version 7 to add that option? I also have issue with most webpages for the same reason. Sure black on white is easiest to read in a book or on paper, but that paper isn’t emitting light from the lightest parts. Webpages that are black with light colored text are much easier to deal with. Often times i’ll hit the white on black option on Universal Access if i have to read a ton of stuff online.
-mattyc

[Dean Sensui]

Not to be facetious, but if you’re wearing glasses, you might want to visit your optometrist and see if your vision is properly corrected for the distance you’re working at.

You could be suffering from basic eye strain, trying to focus on something that’s just not in the right range.

This is assuming that you’re suffering from presbyopia like me (the eyes are getting older and less able to accommodate different distances).

I now have two pairs of reading glasses: For close work at arm’s length. And for really close work, like about a foot or so. I just don’t like bifocals and prefer to have a larger field of vision — thus the extra pair of glasses.

To think I had 20/15 vision just a decade ago!!!

Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii

[Alan Okey]

You could try ShapeShifter, an application that allows you to apply custom themes to OS X’s Finder and applications.

https://www.unsanity.com/haxies/shapeshifter

I got sick of the bright menu bar when I was doing color work in Combustion, so now I use a GUI that is all dark grey.