johannes k.

in old age, just as my ears became very sensitive to sound (i developed first tinnitus and then hyperacusis — and then realised i had suffered for many years from misophonia which recently graduated from being a negative character trait to an actual recognised condition :) my eyes became very sensitive to light so although i am usually reluctant to update software because of the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it principle there is one reason why i eventually moved to mojave (which is by now a fairly ancient version of the macintosh operating system) and that is dark mode.

dark mode represents an entirely different way to interact visually with a computer, one might be tempted to say, it's like the difference between day and night and it would for once not be a cliché. dark mode is in fact, for me at least, life changing.

for quite a few years (2020 2019 2018 2017 i think) i also resisted upgrading my main writing software, scrivener, but one of the nice things about 2021 will be that two days before the end of last year i installed version 3 and that i can now write in it and indeed i am.

the reasoning behind not upgrading to v.3 was that i had paid good money for v.2 and why should i now have to pay another €25 for a whole bunch of extra features that i don't want or need when scrivener is already a maddeningly complex piece of software, one might even be tempted to call it bloatware, but there is a strikingly simple solution which is to not worry about all the features you don't need. but which features do you need and how do you use them? numerous books are written on this subject, endless websites and discussion forums are devoted to it and self appointed experts give workshops on it.

the people who make scrivener, a company with the exceedingly stupid name literature and latté who are based in cornwall in the uk, think this is an entirely reasonable position, unlike the makers of other software (are you listening little snitch? and can i just mention here that vallum does everything little snitch does and you can keep running the fully functional demo until you decide to buy a license which is a third of the price of little snitch) and they ensure the previous version of scrivener continues to work perfectly well on newer operating systems and you can run a demo version of v.3 alongside v.2 for thirty days while you are considering whether to upgrade or not.

i only installed a demo of v.3 because another piece of software i use requires that version and then lo, dark mode. WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THAT YOU CAN RUN SCRIVENER v.3 ENTIRELY IN DARK MODE?

omg here! take my €25. (that's for the upgrade from 2 to 3, a new license is double that)

this boring longwinded blog post was brought to you courtesy of the morning after effects of new year's eve 2020, several glasses of a very drinkable reasonably priced australian shiraz from LIDL called second fleet, way too many oily balls, and what was, for me at least, a very late night. happy newyear!