We’ve had dark mode on iOS and Android for years but I’m now pleased to announce a worthy dark theme has come to the NewsBlur web app.

The origins for this theme came from the community. Originally started by Kemwer in 2013, it has been maintained and updated by Splike since 2014. In fact, you can still use Splike’s theme as an alternate dark mode.

That’s 7 years of NewsBlur having an unofficial dark mode, but users had to jump through hoops to use it: installing a browser extension (which had a malware scare in 2018) or having to copy the Stylish CSS to NewsBlur’s Account settings where it would need to be manually updated. What NewsBlur needed was having it built in.

Today NewsBlur is shipping first-class support. Building a dark theme requires more than inverting the existing color scheme, turning white to black and green to purple. Quite a bit of thought around UX and information hierarchy went into this dark theme design. I also used this as an opportunity to freshen up icons and small visual details on both light and dark themes.

Now we have a consistent dark theme across all of the first-party apps. The Android app had dark mode first in 2014. Then came the iOS app is 2016. Now we’re firmly in 2020 and it’s made it to the web. Goes to show that NewsBlur is always getting better. 

If you like the new features we’ve been releasing recently, I would greatly appreciate if you could share a tweet or Facebook post about NewsBlur. If you enjoy staying connected with culture and news through NewsBlur and you think your friends and followers would too, let them know about your news reader of choice. I appreciate all the kind comments that have come in since releasing this new theme.

In love 🥰 with the new dark theme of @NewsBlur ! Kudos @samuelclay 👍

— Jean Traullé (@jtraulle) June 24, 2020

Ooooooooooooooo @NewsBlur pic.twitter.com/eG3XSXzuAG

— Billy O’Neal (@MalwareMinigun) June 23, 2020

And please keep the good ideas coming on the forum.