Guest post by Matt McLeod.
I use white on black screen mode on my Mac a lot: big areas of bright white hurt my eyes. But not everything benefits from the inverse video treatment and some things become downright unreadable, so it’s a toggle that is flicked quite frequently. It needn’t be like this.
To start, here’s a screenshot [Ed: click on the shot to see a larger version]:
What you’re seeing here is a trick Linux’s KDE 4.2 can do that’d be lovely to have on the Mac. It’s an extension of the basic “inverse screen” mode we already have, where individual windows can be displayed in inverse mode. In this example there’s an inversed Firefox window in the background while the foreground has a (not inversed!) video player displaying the movie Ghost World.
The toggle sticks to each window until it’s closed and is tied to the window not the application – that is, you can have one Firefox window inversed and another not. It also works in reverse: you can put the whole display into inverse and then toggle that off for specific windows.
This is the logical next step for white-on-black mode. Apple have been great about accessibility in OS X over the last few years, so here’s hoping.
(Note: white on black is toggled by pressing command-control-option-8.)
- Matt McLeod
This is a great idea – would love to have this feature on os x. Are there any apps or addons that will do this?