[gorgonzola]

I know it's a long shot, but has anything come of the AppleAquaColorVariant setting in the defaults system? In 10.1.5, running defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleAquaColorVariant gives me 6 when running with Graphite. I think Aqua Blue is 1; does anyone see anything from 2-5 or 7+ under Jaguar by any chance?

Just curious.

[faragbre967]

Originally posted by gorgonzola:
I know it's a long shot, but has anything come of the AppleAquaColorVariant setting in the defaults system? In 10.1.5, running defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleAquaColorVariant gives me 6 when running with Graphite. I think Aqua Blue is 1; does anyone see anything from 2-5 or 7+ under Jaguar by any chance?

Just curious.

I got the same thing you did in 10.1.5. What is this and what does it do?

[sandsl]

I would guess that its something for the future....maybe there will be more aqua colors (other than blue or graphite) in the next major revision of OSX.

I think Apple has been concentrating on performance in Jaguar and maybe in the next major update it will be 'fun' things like new aqua tints, cool screen effects...etc..etc..

[KaptainKaya]

[PowerMacG4:~] tdehring% defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleAquaColorVariant
2002-08-06 13:23:46.987 defaults[1226]
The domain/default pair of (kCFPreferencesAnyApplication, AppleAquaColorVariant) does not exist

From build 6C106.

[Mac Guru]

macguru% defaults read NSGlobalDomain AppleAquaColorVariant

6

From 6c106

Mac Guru

[smeger]

Oddly enough, there are actually three variants in use right now - Aqua, Graphite & Clear.

Developers can set up their widgets so that they will activate when the user clicks them, even though they're not currently in the frontmost window.

You can see this in System Prefs. Bring some other window to the foreground and click a control in System Prefs - most of 'em work on the initial click, instead of "click once to activate window, a second time to activate control."

When you move a window with these kinds of controls out of the foreground (by bringing a different window to the front), these controls switch to a different theme variation called Clear. It's pretty subtle, but you can see it if you've got the stock Aqua theme installed.

Interestingly, I've only seen Cocoa apps do this - I'm not sure if Carbon apps can. I call this interesting because the Clear variant is defined in the 'tvar' resource of Extras.rsrc. This file is sparsly supported by Cocoa apps, so I'm surprised that they handle the variant properly.

All of this, of course, gives hope for theme variants, since Cocoa apps can obviously already handle 'em.

More info about Clear is available in Apple's Developer Human Interface Guidlines, by the way.

[gorgonzola]

smeger -- interesting stuff. I'll take a look at the HI Guidelines for more details on that.

faragbre967 -- As of 10.1.5 (at least), AppleAquaColorVariant controls which "theme" you're using. Currently, the only options are really Aqua Blue and Graphite, although "Clear" exists in a slightly different way, as smeger pointed out. I was just curious as to whether there happened to be some other variants added as of 10.2, but apparently not. It was a long shot anyway. ;-)

[Rickster]

Clear isn't a special theme variant or something developers can set up on a per-button basis: what you see in that header file is a relic from the early days of Aqua.

In Mac OS X Developer Preview 3, all push buttons (the rounded type seen in alert panels, etc.) were blue, and the default button pulsed. Apple apparently decided that was a little too much blue, so in DP4 they scaled back a bit: some buttons in a dialog were blue, some were clear.

The idea was that there were three levels of importance for buttons: in any given panel, there'd be the default button which you're most likely to want to press, some other buttons which you might want to press, and a few buttons you're not likely to want to press (or which are inadvisable because they might cause a destructive action).

By the time Public Beta came along, things had changed to the way they are now: default buttons are blue/graphite and pulse, all others are clear. (And stuff that's blue/graphite in the front window is colorless but darker than "clear" in background windows.) The NSControlTint settings are non-functional.

My conspiracy theory as to why blue is 1 and graphite is 6 (since it's been that way every since Graphite was introduced in the Public Beta): when Aqua was first shown to the world at MWSF 2000, it was hinted that there'd be variants for all the iMac colors (at the time). When Steve went through showing slides of each control type, some of them were lime, tangerine, grape, and strawberry. And at the same time, the tabs at the top of the Apple website were introduced, also in Aqua style with the iMac colors. At some point, though, Apple changed its mind and focused on blue/graphite.

[smeger]

I'm also curious how the AppleAquaColorVariant number maps onto the tvar & tdat resources in the theme files. We've got this:

___AppleAquaColorVariant____tdat ID
___1 (Aqua)_________________1
___6 (Graphite)_____________3
___? (Clear)________________2

Doesn't make much sense...

[smeger]

Originally posted by Rickster:
[B]Clear isn't a special theme variant or something developers can set up on a per-button basis: what you see in that header file is a relic from the early days of Aqua.

I don't think that this is correct. Here's the documentation from Apple's current HI guidelines explaining that Clear is still in use.

[Rickster]

That's not about Control Tint, that's about click-through. It's implemented by setting the "enabled" state of a widget based on whether the window it's in is active. In the second image of the page you refer to, there are three controls which remain enabled when their window (the save sheet) is in the background, and one control which is disabled.

In Cocoa, enabled controls automatically switch from blue/graphite to clear when their window is in the background, and developers must make sure that non-click-through items disable when the window becomes non-frontmost. In Carbon, all controls disable when a window goes to the background, and it's up to the developer to enable controls which should be eligible for click-through.

So, yes, the system draws at least three different versions of every control, including some that weren't in Platinum. But no, Aqua/Graphite versus Clear isn't a design decision developers can make anymore. Click-through affects appearance, but as far as the developer is concerned, it's a matter of what responds to events -- the system does the drawing of different widget states. The only thing the ControlTint APIs are useful for now is finding out whether the user has chosen Aqua or Graphite.

[CharlesS]

I posted a thread about this back in the 10.0.x days, which was promptly ignored. I'm not sure I really want to remind everyone of this one but here goes. I guess you could call it a "clear" theme...

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...threadid=25595

[smeger]

Originally posted by Rickster:
That's not about Control Tint, that's about click-through.

Sorry, I think we're having a semantics clash The point that I was trying to make is that there are currently three themed variants in use, implying that

• More than two are possible
• Cocoa apps change their theme variant quite often
• Themes can be applied to individual Cocoa applications independent of the rest of the OS

So, what I'm really trying to say is "Golly gee whizz! Aren't themes exciting?"

Sorry for any confusion