Blackle

Blackle. It's Google, only black.

The designers claim that having computer screens displaying lots of black rather than lots of white leads to lower energy consumption, and therefore created this black version of Google. Apparently, tests have shown that this may be true on CRT monitors, but not on LCDs, which now dominate across the world.

Well, regardless of all this, it's actually nice to have websites with dark backgrounds in my opinion. For the last year or so, I've been using a dark theme (white or off-white text on black or dark grey backgrounds) on my computer and it is much easier on my eyes. I suppose I should probably update this website along the same lines, actually.

I have to say though, that it is annoying how many applications and websites don't account for people who might have this kind of colour scheme set up on the OS or browser, and are built with fairly lazy style sheets. For example, on parts of Flickr, the CSS specifies dark grey text, but fails to specify a light background for the same areas. This means that it becomes unreadable. So, any web designer people reading this, please do bear in mind that people might be viewing your pages on systems with other colour schemes than the "high usability" ones defaulted to by most interface designers these days.

I have always wondered though, why, when on text consoles, we spent decades using white-on-black, when we're in a GUI, we default to black-on-white... Answers on a postcard!