Hi. Main editor, Header bar is dangerously pink when in split mode.
Tried: went through every Preferences tab and option, rolled back to Defaults, cleared navigation options, removed all labels status whatsnot… tried everything, color won’t change.
It bugs. Screams a warning sign or an error message. You don’t want an interface to communicate to you in a wrong way.
The app used to be intuitive, handy and cozy. Now it’s a struggle, sorry for this feedback
sincerely
bugged by pink
It’s likely that your system accent colour, what is used for buttons and checkboxes and such, is pink (in System Preferences: General). The latest Scrivener update changed it from having a standard binder-blue = active, and red colour for locked editor split.
So I’m afraid the only way to get it back is to use default blue for everything.
Thank you AmberV. really appreciate it.
Please check developer. apple. com / design / human-interface-guidelines / macos / visual-design / color down to the part how you : Don’t hard code system color values in your app
And so I am afraid we found out that the system accent Red, which looks very nice as a system accent, in Scrivener translates into error-message-pink, which somehow was not tested before hardcoded.
No fix. a workaround: try switching your system to …grey? while using Scrivener
glad we got a solution
Please check developer. apple. com / design / human-interface-guidelines / macos / visual-design / color down to the part how you : Don’t hard code system color values in your app
I’m quite sure the graphic designer went through all of those guidelines several times, and if I had to guess I would say Apple means don’t hard code them, in the actual technical sense, where you have software that is always System Blue in its buttons, or whatever, no matter the user’s preferences. I wouldn’t myself describe using a dynamic colour setting that comes from the system as hard-coding. It’s rather the opposite if something is dynamic.
To relay his thinking on the matter, he felt that the system accent colour should be used to indicate elements that are “active” within the software window. There are other examples that use that approach, such as the Forklift dual-pane file manager.
I don’t actually disagree with you to be clear, it’s a change that never made any sense to me, on something that wasn’t broken. How Scrivener used to use colour to communicate the various split states had very little to do with the concept of “active focus” in the interface—where you’d have a good argument for using the system colour. It is now using a binary colour system (inactive vs active) to express four different states, so it is obviously going to be less effective at communicating some of them than it used to be.
But again, it was considered that Apple so strongly wants software to look “accented”, that this was worth having less effective communication overall. Maybe they are right. I don’t claim to understand Apple design decisions much, these days, so I could be out of touch.
No fix. a workaround: try switching your system to …grey? while using Scrivener
You might not want to use that one either. I used to use system grey, but found it impossible to use Scrivener efficiently with it, because the difference between an inactive split, active split and locked split is inscrutable at all times.
And so I am afraid we found out that the system accent Red, which looks very nice as a system accent, in Scrivener translates into error-message-pink, which somehow was not tested before hardcoded.
Well, that is all at once culturally contextual (where I’m from, yellow is generally used for strong warnings and errors more often than red), quite a presumption, and lastly, not very charitable. One can make a decision you don’t care for or agree with, without them being incompetent. I tested every facet, window, dialogue box and corner of the cosmetic update across multiple macOS versions. Missed a few pixels here and there, but we got most of them sorted out.
oh. i now have a purple header … which i don’t want. my system accent IS gray. can i do anything? or should i revert to the previous version of scrivener?
If you’re seeing purple, that probably means you’re using macOS 11? If so, then no, I wouldn’t recommend it. A version old enough to work differently would have been built before that system existed, and that often doesn’t work well with macOS.