Of course, that means the “Use dark menu bar and Dock” checkbox is also a thing of the past. The old “Blue” and “Graphite” Appearances are gone, replaced by the Light and Dark Appearances. This has led to some changes in the General preferences pane: MacOS Mojave also introduces the concept of Accents. I think it’s a nice nod to accessibility for text-heavy apps, and I hope third-party developers take advantage of this ability. This lets text and attachments be viewed more easily for some users. One example is Mail, which can use the Light Appearance for messages, but the Dark Appearance for its window chrome, matching the system: I don’t foresee something like Final Cut Pro X gaining a light theme anytime soon.Īpple has also given developers the ability to use the Light Appearance in sections of their applications. As before, Apple believes that media-focused tools should be dark at all times. The biggest is that not all apps should always follow the Appearance that has been set by the user. There were a few that jumped out at me, however. Note that this is not the same as Vibrancy, which allows a lot more of the background color through the material used in places like Finder’s sidebar, Spotlight, Notification Center and more:Īs you may imagine, Apple has a bunch of helpful tips for developers in the Dark Mode sessions and the What’s New in Cocoa for macOS session on the WWDC website. Desktop Tinting is automatically applied to NSWindow and related classes In this over-the-top example, you can see that the color temperature of the two windows is tweaked by the wallpaper beneath them: In Dark Mode, they are a little crisper and slightly more opaque, complete with an inner stroke around the edges of windows to help them appear more defined.Īnother example of this is Desktop Tinting, a technique Aqua uses to alter the grays used in Dark Mode to be more harmonious with the current Desktop picture. Apple has gone through and fine-tuned the smallest details to make this work.įor example, the window shadows are different between the Light and Dark Appearance. darkaqua.Īs we’ve seen, this is far from a mere inversion of the default Appearance. In a no-nonsense fashion, the new Dark Mode is dubbed. “Light Mode,” which we’ve all been using since 2001 is known as. To achieve this Apple has introduced an entire new Appearance to macOS. (Don’t miss the dark new Trash Can!) Under the Covers There’s a reason that pro apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic come with dark modes now everyone can enjoy the UI fading into the background. Your eye is naturally drawn to the thumbnails in Finder, and Preview’s window chrome doesn’t compete with the open document. Apple’s modern design language, the company is fond of saying, is made to get out of the way, allowing users’ content to shine through.Īpple has returned to that well with Dark Mode, and I think it works. The last point, “Dark Mode is content-focused” should sound familiar to anyone who was around during the iOS 7 transition, or who was paying attention when OS X Yosemite was introduced. Here’s a shot of it in High Sierra:Ĭlearly that’s no way to build any sort of Dark Mode for millions of people to use every day. In short, everything is strictly inverted, and things get weird. If you have never inverted the macOS UI, take a trip into the Appearances System Preferences pane and flip it on. The first point is hard to argue with, so I will let it stand. In its “Introducing Dark Mode” session at WWDC, Apple gave three broad guidelines for Dark Mode: With macOS Mojave, Apple has gone much further with Dark Mode, as you can see: Everything else - from Finder windows to built-in apps - remain their normal, bright selves, no matter what System Preferences says. To say that Yosemite comes with a “Dark Theme” is vastly over-stating the “Dark menu bar and Dock” option found in the “General” preference pane:Īs shown above, OS X’s new dark mode only affects the menu bar, Command+Tab UI, drop-down menus, the Dock and Spotlight. When Apple redesigned macOS back in 2014 with Yosemite, it included a less ambitious version of the feature. The most obvious change to macOS coming later this year is in the inclusion of Dark Mode.
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