With each point release of iOS 7 and each beta release of iOS 8, I hoped Apple would craft a black-mirror view of their white world.

I hoped in vain, for a system-wide dark mode. Where the white background could go dark and the dark texts could go light.

But alas, now with the official release of iOS 8, there is no dark mode. I hoped Apple would implement it because dark mode isn't just a feature for night time use. For some of us dark mode is an accessibility feature.

Sacks of Fluid

Many years ago, on a sunny day, I looked at the bright blue sky and saw a small blurry spot on it that shifted with, but didn’t exactly follow, my vision.

Something was stuck. On my eye.

I tried to rinse it off myself, but to no avail. One, slightly panicked, trip to the the eye doctor later and I learned the spot wasn't on my eye but inside my eye.

My first floater had arrived.

Floaters are, among the list of all the things that can go wrong with your vision, pretty minor. They are nothing compared to the creeping, maddening, horror of macular degeneration.

That said… floaters are still really annoying.

The fluid in your eye congeals a bit, or flecks of the interior wall of your eye break off -- these solid pieces then float lazily around the interior of your eyes. Impossible to focus on, yet still getting in the way of your vision.

Many people eventually develop one or two but, if you're unlucky, their number continues to increase until there are always many in your field of vision. Just how annoying this is is difficult to convey. They follow what you look at but not quite so it is impossible for your brain to learn to photoshop them out. They drift around never quite in the same spot and, given their lightness and the viscousness of your eyeball fluid, difficult to make go away.

As a result – I’ve developed a bit of a tic that I try to conceal when talking to people, – if a floater is too directly in the field of vision I’ll look up and down in quick succession – trying to stir the snow globe of my eyes into a less frustrating pattern.

Back to iOS

Floaters are most visible on a bright white background when trying to discern thin dark shapes.

This is reading. For someone with a lot of floaters, it always looks something like this.