[deej5871]

This may be a stupid question but..

I've been going into ThemePark a little bit and I think I have down what everything does, except the clear states. I remember something in a comment about what you should do with them, but it was wasn't very clear to me (pun intended). What exactly do they do? What should I make there? The same as the other states except without colors? I dunno. Can someone give me a good explanation?

Sometimes in the comments I see they are supposed to be the same as other images but I still don't understand. What am I missing?

[wibs]

Clear states suck. End of explanation

Seriously, here's the deal as much as I can figure out. For many elements, clear is completely ignored. In other instances, graphite/blue is ignored and the clear state is used for both. In others, clear is the state that's used for elements in cocoa windows that aren't the frontmost window.

Basically, the only way to find out how clear will work for a particular element is to try something and see. If you're going for the most consistent look, clear should probably look like blue. If you're going for the most interactive, clear should be the inactive state for those elements that use it for unfocused cocoa windows. While imho the more interactive it is and the more feedback you get from the interface the better, you really can't get a consistent effect across all of the elements.

To be completely safe just make blue and clear the same. It won't be pushing any boundaries, but 99% of the people who use your theme won't notice anyway.

[deej5871]

Wow.. good explanation.

So, clear states are a common problem? I was thinking I was just dumb since I searched the forum and found no other mention of clear states except in a topic about the changes between 10.2 and 10.3 (it wasn't a very big mention either). I'll try and follow those instructions when (more like if) I make a theme..

[smeger]

According to Apple, Clear is a variant of Aqua (like Graphite is). Clear is applied to a control in a non-front-most window that will do whatever the control does if you click on it.

In other words, if you're running Aqua and Blue is set as the color variant in System Prefs -> Appearance and the System Prefs window is frontmost, the Blue popup menu will have a blue arrow on the right side. If you bring a Safari window frontmost, but can still see the System Prefs window, the popup menu's arrow will change to the Clear variant, indicating that if you click on it, it will pop open immediately, instead of requiring one click to bring the System Prefs window forward and then a second click to popup the menu.

If, on the other hand, that popup menu was designed so that you did need to click it once to make the System Prefs window frontmost and then a second time to pop open the menu, the menu would have shown the Aqua disabled state instead of the clear state. Or, depending on how it had been coded, it might have just shown the standard blue state instead when it wasn't the front-most window.

Very confusing - personally, I think Apple should just dump the clear variant.

[wibs]

Wow, I had no idea that's how it worked, and I can't think of anybody else ever using inactive-yet-active buttons or noticing that there's two types. If people who use their computer as much as I do can't figure it out, you really do have to wonder what the point is.

[smeger]

I suspect that it's a hold-over from the days of NeXT and that it was somewhat of a casualty during the development of Aqua.

Here's Apple's take on this from the Human Interface Guidelines.

[Patcarla]

Originally posted by wibs:
Clear states suck. End of explanation
To be completely safe just make blue and clear the same. It won't be pushing any boundaries, but 99% of the people who use your theme won't notice anyway.

That's usually what I do..
Clear state is used for example in the mail app for the list headers..