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The “Light” theme for Windows store apps

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I was recently talking to a developer working on a Windows store app and he said: “Dude, why the dark background for the apps? Shouldn’t Windows 8 apps be a bit brighter and cheerful? I had to show a good amount of text in my app, so I ended up setting the background to white and foreground to black on the various UI elements and it’s awful! Buttons don’t work as expected, they disappear when I do a mouse-over!”

He was pretty frustrated and I could imagine many others potentially facing this issue.

The solution is surprisingly simple, though!

Open your App.xaml file and set the application’s “RequestedTheme” property to Light.

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And we’re done!

Undo all the hardcoded backgrounds and foregrounds on all the UI elements – leave them to the defaults and you’ll have a light background with dark UI elements!

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The light theme is generally recommended for apps with a lot of text.

 

Thanks for reading!

Amar

 

PS: You can follow me on twitter at “_amarnit”, where I share some quick tips/learning at times!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2012
    simple and very useful
  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2012
    Simple but good!
  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2012
    Also add the HTML side of the story. ui-light and ui-dark
  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2012
    Very useful! Thanks for sharing.
  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2012
    Thanks all, and glad that you liked it!Wriju, yes, will write another post on Blend for HTML/JS - thank you for the suggestion and inspiration :)