iccir/ColorDuctTape

Example project to support named NSColors on older versions of macOS

ColorDuctTape

ColorDuctTape is an example project which uses asset catalog colors while maintaining support for macOS 10.11 and 10.12.

Why?

macOS 10.14 Mojave adds Dark Mode. To support it, Apple recommends the use of asset catalog colors; unfortunately, +[NSColor colorNamed:] doesn't exist on macOS 10.12 and earlier.

I didn't want to specify colors in both the asset catalog and in code, so I wrote a quick script to generate a C file from the asset catalog. It's not beautiful or elegant, but it gets the job done.

How It Works

1. During a build, the "Generate ColorCompatibilityData" script is ran. This compares ${DERIVED_FILE_DIR}/DerivedColorCompatibilityData.h to every file in the asset catalog.
2. If any asset catalog file is newer, or if DerivedColorCompatibilityData.h doesn't exist, ColorCompatibilityGenerate.rb is ran.
3. ColorCompatibilityGenerate.rb is a quickly-written script to parse the Contents.json of *.colorset directories. The RGBA tuples are written out as a C file.
4. The data in this file is imported in ColorCompatibility.m and used in GetCompatibilityColorNamed().
5. GetColorNamed() in Utils.m calls GetCompatibilityColorNamed() on 10.13 and previous systems.

In your own project, you can combine ColorCompatibility.[hm] and Utils.[hm] or merge GetCompatibilityColorNamed() with GetColorNamed(). The complicated structure in this example is due to pulling code from my internal projects.

License

Public Domain