SourceTree

Engineering a darker SourceTree

By on July 17, 2017

 

“non retina-burning” update for SourceTree on macOS has been on our radar for a long while, and recently our senior designer Joel Unger came up with a mock-up on how it might look. We went back and forth on limitations and compromises (i.e. the old expectations versus reality phase) while exploring the concept during ShipIt, Atlassian’s well known hackathon. From there it then entered the development pipeline because even the worst compromise we’d found, potentially losing customization of the toolbar, wasn’t enough to deter 70+% of respondents to a quick Twitter survey.

Engineering Discussion

There are a variety of ways to implement dark themes on macOS. These range from the basic, applying an NSAppearance at the top level of a window and letting it cascade through stock controls like FaceTime, all the way through the ‘off-limits’ way by utilizing ProKit, a well known private framework used during my time at Apple that provided apps such as Final Cut Pro the ability to customize every element of their appearance. Our discussions focused on what limitations and compromises we wished to take, ranging from the use of color (black or tones thereof? custom colors?), how much content was themed, and deciding on how much custom UI to implement versus what options were available out of the box.

With the goal of offering the best user experience possible without saddling us with additional overhead in the future, we ultimately chose to use custom colors (midnight blue tones in this case) throughout, while maintaining all existing functionality with minimal custom UI. While it was the option that proved the most challenging to implement, we felt it would ultimately provide the best value to users by maintaining desired functionality present in the system by default versus other, more straightforward options available. We also decided to focus only on the primary windows a user interacts with rather than focusing on all windows and sheets throughout the app as it exponentially increases the size and scope of such a feature.

Taming the Beast

With the decision made, what did we change and how?

Living with Change

You can give the dark theme and corresponding revised light theme (both of which we consider beta) by downloading it directly from our websitePhased releases are beginning tomorrow in coordination with these “How It’s Made” discussions and we welcome your feedback to review and potentially incorporate in 2.6.1. We’re listening and want to make this the best experience possible as you switch SourceTree from day to night.  🌕🌔🌓🌒🌑

 

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