As I noted in my review of macOS Mojave, there’s a lot more going on with Dark Mode than dark gray window chrome. There were two sessions at WWDC dedicated to Dark Mode. Some apps are easier to adapt to Dark Mode than others from a technical standpoint, but beyond the coding, developers have to grapple with many design issues that affect apps differently.
As with many new features Apple introduces, there’s the way the company would like to see Dark Mode implemented and then there’s the way third-party developers use it in practice. Part of the variety you find is driven by the particular needs of each app. Other differences reflect compromises that are necessary to adapt existing designs to Dark Mode. Sometimes, however, developers intentionally ignore Apple’s recommendations, choosing to take a different path.
In my Mojave review, I collected some representative examples of apps that were ready with Dark Mode implementations when the OS update shipped. Since then, many other apps have been updated. I’ve spent time with many of them and have begun to see some design and implementation patterns among the early adopters that are interesting to compare to similar system apps by Apple. It’s also useful to consider how these variations will impact the experiences users have with these apps.
In the sea of dark gray floating before my eyes, I’ve identified a handful of app categories that illustrate some of the subtle differences between the apps I’ve tried. There are many other good examples, but email clients, task managers, text editors, and note-taking apps are categories that best illustrate how Dark Mode is being used by the first wave of developers to put the feature into practice.
