Readability in Dark Mode Grasshopper

Readability in Dark Mode is very bad: text is black, on dark grey background… white would be better as it is in RH6.

Best wishes!

Bildschirmfoto 2020-09-20 um 23.15.35 Bildschirmfoto 2020-09-20 um 23.15.44

Assuming you mean just MacOS dark mode, that works just fine for me using Rhino 7 SR0 2020-9-15 (Rhino WIP, 7.0.20259.15066, Git hash:master @ 7b653f7913cee10b2bd173435b93e0202bd2ae71)


Judging from your screenshot, it seems to me like the dark mode UI still hasn’t improved much in the latest Rhino WIP 7, which is quite a surprise, especially since people are constantly baited into using the beta version as a remedy for all sorts of problems that won’t get fixed in version 6 anymore, although that is still the golden master (but that’s an other issue entirely I guess).

Anyways, here are some examples of what I think is wrong with Dark Rhino in the latest, official, golden Rhino version:

A minor detail, but on the start screen the template icons don’t display. Nice, since already you get greeted by a bug! :smiley:

Screenshot 2020-09-21 at 07.58.28

In general, I’d say that the contrast between the tiny Rhino command icons and their pop-up window background is off, whereas the descriptive text in plain white seems just a little bit strong.
It just makes the menus super unreadable, especially for black and grey icons. The text on the other hand is way too legible and hard on the eyes, which are accustomed to a mainly dark interface.

Again bold-ish white text on nearly black background. Pops way too much in my opinion!
Also the mouse grey button highlight colour is kinda ugly and has a beta-ish vibe!

Screenshot 2020-09-21 at 07.59.33

Contrast-wise and layout-wise, it’s just not the same as this:

Screenshot 2020-09-21 at 09.01.00

Where I feel like Rhino just needs a little more love, Grasshopper is frankly terrible in Dark Mode! It’s a real labor of love, especially compared to all the super neat, “over-designed” GH2 demos that @DavidRutten posts from time to time on his social media.

The entire colour theme seems off somehow. The component categories on top are sandwiched between two black bars, like a 16:9 film on your home screen.
Text readability is bad, especially for the component categories.

Again, the readability of darker monochrome icons is practically zero in the pop-up menus. The text is okay, but again plain white. How about off-white?

I know that Rhino was never the prettiest application, and I don’t even mean that as an insult, since productivity and functionality are great! It’s absolutely understandable, since it was initially a Windows application (maybe still is), and Microsoft until a few years a go never showed much taste, when it came to the look of their softwares and design of most of their products (the Zune wasn’t bad).

I get it! It’s a :beach_umbrella: to have to redesign a couple of hundreds of icons and it takes time, that’s why I’m still optimistic. But I guess Rhino 7 won’t bring much change in this regard, and yes I know that it features subd modelling and that that’s a huuuge innovation? :wink:

Not sure what kind of content you’d expect from an empty file? The thubmnails show exactly what the files contain…

Sure, but I was under the impression that before at least a preview of the grid and world axes was shown? What is the goal of showing an empty scene represented by a grey rectangle? Aren’t scaled document templates by default empty? Doesn’t make much sense, to me at least.

Rhino 6:

For templates I’d hide the thumbnails, though.

For some reason the text in my GH window is white again… Must have been some bug, that was resolved with restarting or sth. So this particular point is resolved for me.

I agree with @diff-arch with some aspects of readability and style of Dark Mode in Grasshopper, I also wish it GH would automatically change canvas colors matching to Dark Mode, when macOS activates it in the evening - already posted that wish here.

However there are more urgent and important improvements for Rhino for Mac and GH that I would love to see than this one, so I can live with it.

Cheers

Ok. I found the problem:

  1. Open GH
  2. Switch Dark/Light mode
  3. All colors switch, except text

Happens in both directions, as can be seen in this screenshot:

Quitting RH and launching fixes the color issue.

Hi Rudi -

Thanks for providing those steps. Filed as RH-60705.
-wim

Always a pleasure!

Much success,

Rudi

Something small to add here:

The expression editor is also not very readable

Wishing you guys some great work for this week! :ocean: