I've been using an unofficial Discord and Slack client called Ripcord for a while now. <a href="https://cancel.fm/ripcord/" rel="nofollow">https://cancel.fm/ripcord/</a><p>It uses a dark theme by default, which is very appreciated. Another huge plus is that it's not Electron garbage like the official Slack and Discord clients, so you don't have to effectively run one or two other entire web browsers just to do a bit of chatting. On the other hand, it is Qt garbage instead, so it still doesn't integrate with macOS's look and feel very well, and a long-standing bug is that when disconnecting my laptop from a wired ethernet connection, it doesn't automatically reconnect everything once the system switches over to wifi. Neither of these have stopped me from preferring it over the official clients, though. I recommend anyone not satisfied with the crust and bloat of the official Slack and Discord clients to give it a try.<p>EDIT: But, yes, IRC is still the better choice when possible.
Something that got much less attention but deserves it (IMO) is that they have accessible themes for people with color-vision deficiencies. There is a theme for people with tritanopia and one for protanopia & deuteranopia.<p>Having protanopia myself I'm very grateful for any piece of software that takes these issues seriously.<p>For those on Visual Studio Code: the slack themes are also available there, including the color blind themes.
Funny that as Discord releases a light theme, Slack releases a dark theme.<p>But in seriousness, does Slack really have any value proposition over Discord beyond Screen Hero these days?<p>I switched my organization over to Discord based on the ability to create public channels for testers/customers to communicate with my team on the server without any role-based overhead (also because my target market is largely the Twitch/gamer crowd - most of whom already have Discord set up).<p>I understand that there are less integrations baked in, but most are easily worked around with webhooks.
Sad news for custom emoji users. So many look bad now.<p>In all seriousness though - I don't see why all apps/sites don't develop in a "dark mode" first mindset. With all the studies showing eye strain related health issues correlated to bright screens, you'd think this would be an easy solution to help alleviate the problem.<p>Imagine writing your name in the sand on a beach by digging out all the area around the text to make it appear.. why project mostly background light with dark content as opposed to projecting the content and letting the dead space remain dark.
We wouldn't need to wait for Slack to get around to implementing a dark mode interface if we could just use the protocol with clients of our choosing.
Hopes dashed. I have wanted a dark mode for a long time but
the color they picked is a dark blue gray which I find unpleasant. I would rather keep the neutral white/grey-scaled light theme than that. I can only hope that they will eventually make it customizable like the other elements.
I wish they fixed the recurring “enable desktop notifications” prompt in the browser as well. It’s beyond annoying to use Slack in a browser these days because it, especially if (like myself) you only go in for a few minutes every hour and close the tab afterwards.
This is actually a pretty bad implementation. It's very hard to read compared to my IDE dark modes.<p>Like the font weight is too high or something. I had to change back to Light mode.<p>I'm all about dark mode but not a fan here. They need to spend some time and make it more readable.
What's the deal with dark modes? With glossy laptop screens they're 100% unreadable in good natural light conditions; even with a matte screen, they're pretty bad.
Human eye’s signal amplification curve is not linear. [1] You can’t convert an existing app to dark mode so much as building a new design for it, or it looks weird. Youtube’s Dark mode is an example of this uncanny valley.<p>Funnily enough, they themselves illustrated the issue with the first image on their post, in how weird the version on the left looks.<p>Besides - what we need isn’t a full dark mode, it’s an app that is built for the human eye. Dark mode is as extreme as staring into a white lightbulb all day, which is what the light mode is.<p>An example of this is Aether (disclosure: it’s a project I’m designing for: <a href="https://aether.app" rel="nofollow">https://aether.app</a>).<p>It’s designed for the ‘dark’ mode from scratch, or rather, it’s at 40% mode and it’s the only UI, so it aims to work well for both day and night. So we don’t have to go for the one or the other.<p>(I’m not sure about posting here since it’s a ‘Slack competitor’ and I don’t want to look like advertising, but hey, I guess it’s relevant)<p>[1] Contrast Threshold Curve of Human Vision <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Contrast-threshold-curve-of-human-vision_fig1_253055649" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Contrast-threshold-curve...</a>