The pictures showing that “Vibrant Dark” appearance look suspiciously similar to the “Dark Aqua” appearance now (yes, this is from 4 years ago):įrom “Adopting Advanced Features of the New UI of OS X Yosemite” And for those sidebars, a “Vibrant Light” and a “Vibrant Dark” appearances were added, which made sure that system colors, images and controls rendered differently on a blurred light and a blurred dark background. It had to be there, because – if you remember – Yosemite introduced all those translucent sidebars, which were mostly light (Finder, Mail etc.), but some were dark (the notification center panel sliding in from the right edge of the desktop, at least in Yosemite). how system controls like buttons or checkboxes should be rendered, what foreground and background colors to use in which state, what special effects to applyĪnd again, all of this has been there since at least 10.10, and was presented in the WWDC 2014 videos.how various system colors from NSColor should look like in each mode.Inside however, it (or its related classes) hides the whole complexity of determining how things should look when each appearance is used. From outside it’s a very simple class – it basically lets you create an appearance object using several predefined appearance name constants and compare appearances by their name property, and that’s pretty much it. The base class for the appearance system is the NSAppearance class, available since OSX 10.9, so even a year before Yosemite. And again, looking back now at the 2014 talks, it seems kind of obvious in retrospect that these APIs would eventually lead to a full dark mode. Interestingly, there was barely any mention of all that between then and now, so you have to go all the way back to WWDC 2014.Īs with a lot of things before – like AutoLayout or size classes – Apple has introduced some APIs back then that were at first ignored by a lot of people, which have later turned out to be really important after some hardware or software updates made years later. A lot of it sounded kind of familiar as I was listening to it, so I started digging in ASCIIwwdc, and I’ve found three videos from WWDC 2014 that were talking about the exact same things (links at the end if you’re interested). The funny thing is that a large part of what makes Dark Mode work and what was explained in the WWDC talks this year was available since… 2014, when OSX Yosemite (10.10) was introduced. I’ve learned a lot about AppKit while writing this, and I’ve managed to clear up a lot of things which I didn’t fully understand before, so I hope this will help someone else too. ![]() ![]() This first part will be a bit more theoretical about some underlying features and APIs that make the dark mode work or that are especially relevant now, and the second part will be about the things you need to think about while updating the app (and in the future). This eventually grew into the longest article on this blog, so instead of deleting some sections, I’ve decided to split it into two parts. As you’ll see, a lot of work might actually be about removing things.Īs with the changes in notifications, I’ve set out to collect everything related to dark mode from the WWDC videos this year and organize all the information in a way which makes more sense to me (since in the talks these things are often mentioned in a slightly random order and topics are scattered through multiple sessions). The reason is that it seems to require a lot of changes across apps to adapt them to the new appearance, or at least a lot of checking and testing, but it does so in a way that feels like “making things right” – not so much introducing complexity just for this reason, but rather enforcing some order and good practices that were earlier easy to forget about. While I’m not nearly as excited about it from the user’s perspective as some others are □ – I’m totally a “light side” Mac user, I’ve always used a light theme in TextMate, light theme in Xcode, white background in iTerm, and I sometimes have to use reader mode on websites with a dark background – I’m actually very curious about it as a developer. One of the most exciting announcements at this WWDC was the introduction of a long-awaited “dark mode” in macOS 10.14 Mojave, which lets you use a whole desktop with all the apps on it in a dark theme, instead of just the dock and the menu bar as before.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |