I love using Dark Mode, especially at night where there’s not much light around. But one thing I hate is opening up a website link in Safari and suddenly being met with a really bright white screen that almost blinds me! Well, with this new app called Noir, that will never happen again.

If I quickly jump into Safari and visit a couple of websites like Wikipedia, Google, or eBay, and then flick into Dark Mode by using the Control Centre, you’ll notice that the toolbar at the top of Safari goes darker, but the web page itself – well, it just stays the same! And like I said earlier, a big white screen can be quite difficult to look at night time sometimes.

So, what we’ll do is we’ll jump onto the App Store, and we’re going to search for the app called Noir. Now, this app is a paid app (it costs about £2.99), but I think it’s absolutely worth that. When I open the app, the first thing we’re going to do is get an introduction screen that tells us how to enable Noir. Now, this is actually called a Safari Extension, which means it runs in the Safari browser on your iPad or your iPhone. So, we set it up in a slightly different way.

First of all, let’s jump into Safari by pressing the open Safari button, and then we’re going to press the Extensions icon in the toolbar. At the top of here, we’re going to go to Manage Extensions and we’re going to turn on Noir. Then we get a couple of pop-up messages… First of all, do we want to enable the extension for one day or always? Well, I want this to always be there, so it’s obvious what I’m going to choose. And then we get to choose whether it’s going to apply to only one website or all websites? I’ll tap onto Every Website, and now Noir is set up.

We can test it by jumping back to Wikipedia, pulling down in Control Centre, and then turning on Dark Mode. As quickly as that, the Wikipedia page now has a dark theme which it simply didn’t have before! Jumping across to Google and eBay, you’ll notice the same has happened there as well. In fact, any website you browse when your iPad’s in Dark Mode will now look much better and easier on the eyes.

But sometimes, you may not want it to apply to a particular website (for instance, maybe on eBay, you don’t want the Dark Mode enabled). It’s easy to customise this on a website-by-website basis. Tap on that Extensions icon again and then go on to Noir. From here, you can then choose to turn off this feature on this particular website.

But there’s actually a bit more you can do as well because Noir has different themes built-in – not just Dark Mode! If we jump into the app itself for a moment and then go on to the Themes Library, you’ll see what I mean. In here, you can explore and play around with different theme options. There’s one here in the library that I quite like called ‘Firewatch’. When you go on there, you get a preview of what that new effect will look like, so a kind of green/tealy colour with some nice salmon orange links. You can also change how the images display, whether or not they’re in grayscale or slightly opaque so the background colour shines through.

And then when you’re in Safari, press that Extensions icon again, and you can apply this to individual websites – which means I can then make Wikipedia look like this if I wanted to! Or I could choose a theme that was perhaps easier on the eyes like maybe a Sepia one, or if perhaps you’re colourblind or dyslexic, you might find an option that suits you here as well.

And that’s Noir for iPhone and iPad. It’s a great app, and I definitely recommend you go and check it out.