Strange/broken light UI style

[Peter K]

I prefer to use light UI on macOS and I must say that version 2 has lots of serious issues with this option. It looks like nobody bothered to test it.

• Different UI brightness right after setting light UI and after swithing to different app and back.
• Too dark background of selected buttons – bad contrast with icon.
• Too dark backgrond of all buttons actually. Hard to distinguish between normal state, pressed and disabled.
• Select boxes have dark background, they look like disabled. (Input boxes are white)
• All icons on buttons are flat with very low contrast. (Icons in dark mode are much more colorful with 3D effect.)

Overall it is so bad that it forces me to use dark UI instead. Version 1 of Affinity products do much better job in UI usability.

[Chris B]

Hi Peter K,

I can reproduce the UI changing when switching apps - I have absolutely no explanation for that. I will feed this back to development.

• Update for the above comment: I've just tried a few other apps that have a Light UI and noticed that some of them change depending on focus. Still, I will ask the developers to look.

I will also pass the other comments back. Thanks for taking the time to post.

[loukash]

On 11/11/2022 at 9:45 PM, Peter K said:

Different UI brightness right after setting light UI and after swithing to different app and back.

Can confirm, using Catalina. To avoid this, the only workaround so far is to turn the UI Brightness slider down completely.

On 11/11/2022 at 9:45 PM, Peter K said:

Too dark background of selected buttons – bad contrast with icon.

+1

On 11/11/2022 at 9:45 PM, Peter K said:

Too dark backgrond of all buttons actually. Hard to distinguish between normal state, pressed and disabled.

+1
Although in some rare instances like the Edit All Layers button, it's now way better than it was in v1.

On 11/11/2022 at 9:45 PM, Peter K said:

Select boxes have dark background, they look like disabled. (Input boxes are white)

+1

On 11/11/2022 at 9:45 PM, Peter K said:

All icons on buttons are flat with very low contrast.

+1
In fact, for the first time in all those years I've activated the monochrome icons. And in v2, I actually like them!  

On 11/11/2022 at 9:45 PM, Peter K said:

Overall it is so bad that it forces me to use dark UI instead.

I also tried Dark UI, but nevertheless I changed back to the Light UI after two days because it's too much strain on my aging eyesight. 

[Peter K]

16 hours ago, Chris B said:

Update for the above comment: I've just tried a few other apps that have a Light UI and noticed that some of them change depending on focus. Still, I will ask the developers to look.

Thank you Chris for the response. If you want to follow system behavior, application without focus should have darker UI with grayscale icons (macOS Monterey). I think that older versions of macOS use different approach, but I'm not sure right now. However, if your products use custom UI theme, you could implement the latest modern behavior. Or just don't change UI colors at all (many 3-rd party apps do that).

[Peter K]

15 hours ago, loukash said:

To avoid this, the only workaround so far is to turn the UI Brightness slider down completely.

Interesting The brightest UI together with maximum text contrast is as actually usable. Thanks for the tip.

However, I would like to have UI as bright as other system apps.

[Chris B]

Yeah there definitely seems to be something wrong. I've logged it with development so hopefully they can address this  

[Patrick B]

I also prefer working in light mode, especially during the daytime. And I have to say that I 100% agree that the light mode UI in V1 is a much better user experience than V2's light mode. The dark theme of V2 is beautiful, but it's quite apparent that light mode just did not receive the same amount of love and care.

[Peter K]

You fixed it! Nice, thank you.