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by Asooka 2031 days ago
It used to be trivial, because the OS had a configurable palette for GUI elements, which every single program followed, because it used the standard platform GUI toolkit. So going dark or light mode for the entire desktop was as trivial as choosing it from a drop-down menu. Or you could have it pink or green or a horrible mishmash of colour that made you go crosseyed. You could even change font sizes so if you had trouble seeing, like maybe you had cataracts, you could have huge letters on highly contrasting background.
1 comments
PaulDavisThe1st 2031 days ago
This has never been true if your computer ran "creative" software.

Video editing, music creation tools almost never used "the standard platform GUI toolkit" (even Apple has/had their own internal kit used for apps like Logic).

It also stopped being true (or became less true) when cross-platform development became important to some developers and some users, meaning that deeply integrating your application with whatever system a particular platform had was less important than making sure it ran reasonably consistently across platforms.

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jcelerier 2031 days ago
If you use Qt it will use your system theme and colours no matter which OS you run your app on, unless you (the dev) overrides the style manually. I'd believe that's the case for wxWidgets too.
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PaulDavisThe1st 2031 days ago
It's not about Qt's ability to pick up system theme & colors (although not also that the configurability mentioned in TFA goes somewhat beyond what is typically offered by modern desktop environments).

It's about whether or not the application uses custom elements (or even just puts everything in a Canvas and draws everything itself).

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smallstepforman 2031 days ago
A platform native video editor (no cross platform capability), which uses native GUI toolkit would look something like this:

https://discuss.haiku-os.org/uploads/default/original/2X/9/9...

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kleer001 2031 days ago
All the visual effects software I use have light and dark modes.
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nitrogen 2031 days ago
Sonic Foundry (then to some extent Madison, then Sony, then MAGIX) made creative tools that used the native widgets to a pretty good extent.
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