Every year we watch Apple’s WWDC keynote address to see what new features are coming in macOS and iOS that we’ll want or need to support. Last year it was Dark Mode in macOS Mojave. We knew from the moment we saw it that we both wanted and needed to support it.
While at first glance it seemed easy enough, but it was a non-trivial task. Supporting it in the Xojo framework so that you could support it in your apps was fairly straightforward. Supporting it for the Xojo IDE itself, however, was another matter entirely. The IDE has a lot of graphic images that needed to be duplicated and updated so that it would look great under Dark Mode. As a result, Dark Mode ended up consuming nearly an entire release cycle.
When adding Dark Mode support for macOS, we planned ahead so that should it be added (or something like it) to other platforms we support, we’d be prepared. This is also part of what made Dark Mode support a far more significant job.
Prior to yesterday’s keynote, we were fairly certain that Dark Mode support would be announced for iOS 13. Fortunately, with all the work we have already done to support Dark Mode in the Xojo framework, adding it for our iOS framework is a trivial task. For those of you anxious to add it to your iOS apps, fear not.