Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jwells89 655 days ago
To me, this is a big argument as to why devs should be making heavy use of parameterized values their UIs, as opposed to hardcoding things. An app making as much use of parameterized values as possible will not only remain decent looking and usable under most themes (except for themes that are badly built — nothing can help there), but also play much more nicely with accessibility settings like font size, font weight, colorblindness modes, etc.

I will caveat this by saying I haven’t worked with GTK and don’t know how well-tooled it is in this regard. If GTK doesn’t offer any/many parameterized values, then that’s on GTK, not app devs. They’re pretty well supported in macOS/AppKit, iOS/UIKit, and Android/Compose though and should be a cornerstone of any modern UI framework.

1 comments

That’s not a silver bullet.

You can have a logo for your app that is coloured green. Then the user is using an all-green theme that happens to match the shade of your image and the logo is basically invisible.

That’s just easiest counter-example I could come up with.

Totally true that it's not possible to catch all edge cases, but I don't think it's a strong enough reason to rule out user theming/customization altogether, plus as mentioned parameterization should be done anyway for good accessibility.