Has anybody at Xojo actually tried using Color Groups in the IDE?

Targets iOS
1

Sorry for the rant but, seriously, if somebody at Xojo spends more than a few seconds trying to create light/dark versions of your app colors – not using Named colors but rather Dual colors as you would have in a real-world app – you’ll see just how frustrating it is.

You need to click on either the left or right side color (and you need to know the left side == light and the right side == dark), then you need a whole bunch of luck trying to set the RGB value of each one to the right color. I haven’t figured it out but it’s some combination of entering a value, hitting the return key, clicking on the color in the swatch, clicking on the square in the Color Group and then clicking off the Color Group and back on to it so that it redraws itself. But most often it doesn’t save the color change anyway and I need to delete the Color Group and start again.

I think with just the tiniest bit of dog-fooding – ie actually use the Xojo IDE to try to do something real-world with Color Groups in one of Xojo’s own iOS apps – you’ll realise that this still needs work. Meantime, I’m partway through a dark mode conversion and it’s painfully slow…

2

FWIW, we are using ColorGroups in the XDC app.

3

Greg would you mind giving me the steps to create a “Dual” type of Color Group and set two different RGB values, one for light mode and one for dark mode? It’s not as easy as “Create a Color Group, click on the left color, set the RGB value, then click on the right color and set the RGB value” because I can’t get it to work.

4

I suspect the issue you’re having has more to do with the color picker itself than the ColorGroups.

The first issue is that Apple deprecated the old color picker that we’d previously used in 10.7 and there were indications in 10.15 that it’s time is finally up. The new one is asynchronous and behaves differently than the old one.

So here goes…
0. Light swatch is on the left, dark on the right.
0. Click on the left swatch
0. Select the color you want in the color picker
0. Close the color picker
0. Click the right swatch
0. Select a color
0. Close the color picker

5

I see the problem.

If you don’t close between, the picker gets out of sync.

6

Thanks Greg. That’s what I was doing but your comment about the picker being async has solved it for me. I just needed to wait a second or two for the change to be reflected back in Xojo. I was clicking on a swatch, changing the color, thinking it hadn’t changed so clicking again, etc.