I agree and look at many modern sites as well many applications with disdain for their appearance.

I really hate all those different apps post-XP that has to uniquely skin themselves, then having several conflicts withi my dark color scheme.

I suppose dark background went out with the trend towards WYSIWYG.

gerwin wrote:

Fortunately Vogons looks fine.

It doesn't look right at all on my big-screen TV for some reason. Something to do with the picture-sharpness features or something causes all the text to have some weird, bright outline.

Jorpho wrote:

It doesn't look right at all on my big-screen TV for some reason. Something to do with the picture-sharpness features or something causes all the text to have some weird, bright outline.

That's definitely a "feature" of TV screens. As you suspected, you can generally fix it by twiddling with any sharpness related settings, and tuning off any PATENTED-SHARPNESS-ENHANCE-MAGIC type features.

That might negatively affect the way actual TV programs look though, I'm not too sure.

Jorpho wrote:

I suppose dark background went out with the trend towards WYSIWYG.

Not everyone wants to stare at a bright screen pretending to be paper. Don't equate this with Hotdog Stand.

I read about users complaining on the bright appearance of the new MS Office 2013. Some resorted to lowering overall monitor brightness, another solved things by wearing sunglasses.

Dark backgrounds are definitely easier on the eyes than bright ones. Sure, WYSIWYG is great when you intend to print something, but why should that dictate the UI for all the other aspects of using a computer? I'm writing this post in a text editor just to copy-paste it into vogons - I certainly have no need to visualize it in paper form while a blinding white background burns itself into my retinas. It's possible to customize the colors, but when a program is designed with a black-on-white interface in mind, doing that can be a major a pain in the ass.

Another UI trend I'm not fond of is this recent tendency to space everything out, use double line heights for text, and have a huge amount of padding around everything. I don't mean using larger fonts/icons to take advantage of higher resolution screens... it's how there's just so much more useless freaking empty space between all the UI elements.
Like the default setting in gmail since last year's redesign, which halves the number of inbox items you can see without having to scroll (luckily you can change it back to a "compact" view). Or phpMyAdmin, if anyone here uses that - older versions had neat forms that fit nicely in your browser's viewport, but recent ones have freaking horrible themes with pantloads of padding, requiring you to scroll so much that it actively wastes your time.

Maybe touch screen devices are driving this particular trend, because they need more margin for error since people's big fat fingers aren't nearly as precise as a mouse cursor, or something.

SquallStrife wrote:

That's definitely a "feature" of TV screens. As you suspected, you can generally fix it by twiddling with any sharpness related settings, and tuning off any PATENTED-SHARPNESS-ENHANCE-MAGIC type features.
That might negatively affect the way actual TV programs look though, I'm not too sure.

Turning it off might have a perceived "negative" effect if you're used to the artificial sharpening, but you still a get a better (more faithful) reproduction of the original image. A friend of mine has the same problem with his Samsung HDTV; text (and anything else with frequent high contrast) looks completely off, and as far as we've found, there isn't even a way to disable the "feature" in this particular TV.