Have problems with eye-strain and headaches? You are not alone. For a number of years I also suffered from these problems. That is, until I found out what was causing them: excessively bright monitors and black on white colour schemes.

Logically this makes perfect scene, if you are spending all day staring at a white computer monitor, you are basically staring at a rectangular light bulb. Try staring at a light bulb for 10 plus hours, your eyes will start to hurt, the same is true of computer monitors.

The first step towards solving this problem is to do a rough monitor calibration. Modern LCD monitors come set to maximum brightness by default, unless you are working outside or in a greenhouse, this is far too bright. Although it sounds complicated, this step is as simple as it gets: Open up the brightness settings using the buttons on your monitor. Next reduce the brightness until the monitor stops glaring. At this point your monitor will match the level of ambient lighting where your computer is located. Don’t be scared to reduce the brightness a lot, I have to set my monitor to 20% brightness before it matches the ambient lighting here.

Now that your monitor’s brightness is matched to your ambient lighting, we can move on to the second problem, how do you get rid of white backgrounds? The following sections describe the process for the operating systems that I know how to theme. It should also be possible on other systems like Apple OSX and Linux/QT, but I have no experience with them.

Microsoft Windows

On the whole, it is notoriously difficult to customise the visual style of Windows, although it is possible to some degree.

On Windows XP[*]: right click on the desktop and select properties. Then go to the appearance tab. This only works with the “Windows Classic” theme, so select that from the “Windows and buttons” menu. Now that is done click on the advanced button, bringing up a window that lets you set the colours of the different elements of the interface. Just go through these and choose some dark colours.

The main problems with this come from applications that set ether the font colour or background colour, but not both. This makes such an application unusable because it displays unreadable black on black or white on white text. Two applications that suffer from this problem are skype (black on black text) and any website displayed in Internet Explorer that does not set foreground/background colours. Also there are a collection of applications that completely ignore the system colours.

Linux/Gnome

If you are using Linux/Gnome, things are much easier and also don’t have a side effect of breaking things. Open the system menu, select the preferences item then click on appearance. Next select one of the themes that you like and hit the customise button. In the window that pops up select the colours tab, then set some dark colours.

You can also find plenty of excellent dark themes for download on Gnome Look.org. These can be installed using the install button in the themes window.

Fixing the web

The only browser that I am aware of that can change website background colours is Firefox. In Firefox, open the preferences window, select the content tab and click on the colours button. If you disable the check box to allow pages to set there own colours, you can set your own in the 4 colour selector boxes above.

What about the web? That mainly fixes the OS, with the exception of a few applications, but what about the web? Unfortunately many websites suffer from the white background problem. If you are using Firefox you can go into the menus and set your own colour scheme. Although doing this does break the functionality of some websites. Alternatively, you can customise websites using the Stylish add-on. Many of the popular websites already have dark user themes avalalbe for use with it.

Footnotes

[*] It should also be possible on Windows Vista/7, however as I don’t use ether of those OS’s, I cannot say how.

Laptops are an excellent concept on the surface, a computer which is easily portable, unfortunately this only exists of the surface thanks to that thing sitting on your table called the mouse.

No matter how you think about it, portable computers and mice just do not mix. Sure there have bean some nasty, hacky attempts at creating a portable mouse like the touch pad and “TrackPoint” but they all fall behind on the usability front, to the point that a large proportion of laptop users resort to carrying around an external mouse.

But portable computers should be usable stand alone, without the requirement to carry around additional bulky hardware which takes extra time to get out and put away. Because of this it is imposable to call the use of mice with laptops anything other than an anti-pattern, a case of extremely prolific bad design.

Things don’t have to be this way, take for example the vast array of smart phones on the market which are perfectly usable stand alone. These devices work because they dispense with the “desktop metaphor”, instead opting for innovative control solutions with tabbed interfaces and touch screens. Macking the most out of the limited physical space and hardware resources available.

How should laptops work? They should be considered a completely independent platform like smart-phones, not a knock off of the `desktop’ architecture. Apple has basically done exactly this with there IPad platform. All software for the platform must be purpose designed, which means that it works well out of the box with no additional interface hardware.

Currently the only way to achieve a high level of usability and portability (no external mouse) with commodity laptop hardware is to use only keyboard driven applications and dispense with the mouse altogether. While it is possible to produce a completely usable computer by doing this, as I have achieved it with my own machine, it does require a shift in the way you get your work done, including completely abandoning all common GUI software as it is close to imposable to use comfortably with only a keyboard.

Hopefully devices like the IPad will put pressure on other manufacturers in order to prompt the development of easily usable, mouse free portable computers.