[APBeta] The Dark Side

[Paul Rodman]

On Oct 31, 2009, at 8:26 AM, Dan Kuchta wrote:

> OK, I've gone to the dark side - Windows!  I just purchased a  
> netbook on woot since they were selling one with a 1366 by 768  
> resolution so it should run AstroPlanner with enough space to work  
> well.
>
> In anticipation of its arrival, I downloaded the latest AP beta for  
> Windows and am playing around with it in VMWare Fusion on the Mac.   
> One thing I noticed right away is that the night vision mode doesn't  
> work very well.  Much of the background color for the windows stays  
> gray instead of turning red.  Is this a known problem with the  
> Windows version?  If not, then it's probably just some strange  
> behavior of VMWare Fusion.  I'm running XP Professional with SP3.
>
> Here's a screen capture of what I see in Night Mode:

No, that looks like Win XP in "standard" theme mode. You can go into  
the Display control panel and set the theme to "Windows Classic". That  
will work better.

The problem is that, unlike the Mac, there's no easy way to make the  
entire screen red*. What you have to do is colour individual elements  
of the UI. Windows has an API to do this, but since XP it doesn't work  
on all UI elements. I think it has been deprecated in favour of  
themes. I have struggled mightily to work around this, to no avail. In  
theory, you should be able to create a "red theme" and change themes  
when you're in the dark. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to do  
this programmatically.

For Windows, I strongly recommend a physical red screen (plexiglass,  
etc.) in front of the monitor.

Paul R.

* this is not strictly true. You can twiddle the display's gamma to a  
certain extent in Windows, but (a) it only works for about 20% of  
video cards/drivers/settings, and (b) the range of "redness" is very  
limited and nowhere near enough for astronomy.