When the Words Disappeared in Dark Mode

In Dark mode in the Mac app, you could not read what you wrote. I found that out on 26 September, when I asked for a list of improvements to the whole app and for every item to be carried out in order, without stopping to ask me. It was the first thing on the list. Every job was built, captured in light and dark, checked by a second reader, and saved as a checkpoint I could undo on its own.

01How the list was made

Before anything was built, the app was captured in 57 states, in light and in dark: every destination, every section of the Desk and the Wiki, every tab of Analysis, every mode of the right-hand panel, and Write open on a 34-chapter novel. The captures came from separate copies of the app running in the background. I assumed that left my own session alone. Section 05 says what that cost.

One set of AI reviewers looked for faults and another checked the findings. After combining duplicates, I had 36 jobs, and added 12 more during the work.

02The invisible words

Job one was the biggest. Open the app in Dark, open a chapter, and the manuscript was black on a black page. Switch to Dark while the app was running, and it was near-black on black.

The cause was two things meeting. Chapter bodies come back from the drafts log with no colour set on ordinary text, which is how it should be. And an earlier pass that prepared pages for printing had frozen whatever it saw into one fixed grey. In Light that grey looked fine. In Dark it vanished.

Ordinary text now follows the app's appearance, the printing pass touches only colours the writer chose, and it runs again whenever the appearance changes. In Light, the body of a chapter is now the same warm ink as the title instead of pure black.

I had been looking at this app for months. Most of the time I use it in Light.

03The rest of the list

Most jobs were small and were about one idea said in one way:

• Every left rail uses the same side inset, and every header rule stops at it.
• Plot and Analysis show the work's name between the two rules, as Write does.
• The empty page takes its page's own background, and says "No book open." in the same words everywhere, without a line about how to use the page.
• I removed some explanatory captions.
• Buttons that were phrases became icons. The Wiki's "Add Character" is a plus.

The Wiki and Analysis got the same page heading as the Library: the hand-lettered title at 28 points, a quiet count, a mark at the edge and a rule.

04How each job was checked

A job had an implementer and a separate reviewer. The implementer built the app, captured the states it touched in both appearances and compared them with the morning's. The reviewer read the whole diff, looked at the pictures itself, and passed it or sent it back. Five jobs went back at least once.

After job 40, eight more reviewers compared all 57 states before and after, looking only for what the pass had made worse or left half-done. They reported no regressions in the states they compared. There were further fixes after that review.

05A mistake of the assistant's, written down

Early in the pass a reviewer pressed the Plain Text button in one of the background copies. The copies share the app's preferences, so Write would have opened in plain view for me, from then on. It was caught on a before-and-after sheet and set back. From then on every background copy ran on a scratch copy of the library and put back any preference it changed. At the end my preferences were compared with the morning's and were identical.

The preference change was recorded at the time, and put back.

06What it did not catch

A later measurement found a button seven points off centre in these same screenshots. The pass had looked at them closely and passed it. The next post is about that. This pass made the app more consistent and fixed a fault that would have embarrassed me in front of any reader who uses Dark. The screenshots had not been enough to catch everything.

Thanks for reading.

J.H.

Next: The Button Was Seven Points Off Centre →