Hello Operators.
Today Winlink Express got an important update. It’s now possible to customize the text color and window background to your liking.
This update was especially important to me, as someone suffering from a degenerative eye disease. The black text on the white background made it impossible to work long periods in Winlink Express, without experiencing extreme eye discomfort or even a migraine.
The black text on the white background also caused night blindness and increased eye strain, not to mention the additional time it took to get your night eyes when looking away from the laptop. This was a problem while operating at night or in the low light for example, in the shelter.
Previously I had used high-contrast mode in Windows 10. This worked well enough for Winlink Express. Unfortunately, the high-contrast settings working with Winlink Express, didn’t work with the visualization settings of other applications on that computer. So it was a nightmare.
With all that said, here are a couple of pictures of Winlink Express with the dark mode enabled. The development team has provided a variety of colors to choose from for foreground text or background color. You can choose between them as you like.
So a huge thanks to the Winlink development team. There are no words to describe how grateful I am for this update, or how useful it is. Other amateur radio developers should take this update as an example to their own application development. Visualization is something generally overlooked in amateur radio these days. Not only is dark mode and visualization customization controls important to operators suffering from some eye disorders, these visualizations are also important to emergency and tactical Communications where we would like to reduce operator fatigue from staring at a bright white light bulb.
The Winlink Dev team has my gratitude.
73
Julian oh8stn
YouTube http://www.youtube.com/c/oh8stn
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Excellent news. I agree that the visualizations are important and will be very helpful to emergency and tactical Coms operators. 73!
I always believed that dark mode consumes less power. If so an additional positive aspect.
It’s true and another good reason to have it
Fine Business. 🙂 I take it you have an updated release? I am using version 1.6.6.0 and do not see that setting, but it is Wednesday so I’m a bit more focused on creating and sending my several WW Net Check-ins.
It’s a Beta release, so if you have that checked in your settings, you should see the new setting after the update
This is outstanding! Do you happen to have a link? The latest version on the winlink.org site is 1.6.6.0 from July.
It’s the latest beta from this morning.
This is great news!
I have been using my cellphone in DARK mode for years. 😉