Inverting colours

Marty_J

Well I'm going to try out Windows 7 if some blank DVDs I ordered ever get here, so if anyone needs any help with that, maybe I'll be able to advise them better.

Lum

espresso wrote: »

This is a Windows setting, so should affect any software running in Windows.

There is plenty of badly written software out there that doesn't follow the windows colour schemes (or even worse only partially follows it so that, eg. text follows your colour scheme but backgrounds dont, resulting in white text on a light grey background in this case.

Sadly there is no fix than this other than finding the developer, smacking them in the face and telling them not to be so ****ing stupid, and I'm not aware of any software that will fix this short of hacking the executable files and changing the hardcoded colours, which lets face it isn't going to happen.

Depending on the nature of the software you might have some mileage in going back to the developers and threatening them with the disability discrimination act, I think the health and safety at work act also has something to say about this issue too.

Of course if this is being caused because the app supports skins then you'll need to figure out how to make a new skin for it.

What app is it?

Marty_J

But surely it's not just a question of Windows telling applications to have a black background and white text?

Doesn't it invert the colours at the OS level?

I mean, if I do it in Mac OS X, I get this, and everything is inverted before it reaches the display.

Won't the same thing happen in Windows?

Lum

In Windows there are a number of "special" colours in addition to the standard 24bit colour range, using these will get your control drawn in eg. "Text colour" or "background colour".

Most of the major GUI development tools (Visual Studio, Delphi etc. even MS Access) will make any controls you create use these colours by default but some really early versions did not and even if they did, it doesn't stop someone changing the colour of the odd control while leaving the rest on the defaults with the result that part of the app follows the colour scheme and the rest does not.

This used to be endemic in the Windows 3.x days where many application toolbars had the 3D bevel effect in white and dark grey while the actual button followed the system default setting which may not be light grey.

It's not the fault of the OS. I'm sure I could write a Mac application that chose to ignore Apple's design guidelines and forced it's own colours too.

There is no "invert everything" option in Windows (though some graphics drivers may provide this feature now that I think about it, may be worth having a poke around in the nVidia control panel or ATI CCC if you have those) just the option for an inverted colour scheme.

Marty_J

Lum wrote: »

It's not the fault of the OS. I'm sure I could write a Mac application that chose to ignore Apple's design guidelines and forced it's own colours too.

I'm not sure how you'd do that, apart from to invert the application's colours, so when OS X inverts them, they would look normal.

There is no "invert everything" option in Windows (though some graphics drivers may provide this feature now that I think about it, may be worth having a poke around in the nVidia control panel or ATI CCC if you have those) just the option for an inverted colour scheme.

I had a bit of a Google, and I found this, which apparently will invert all the colours (among a great many other things). I've never used it, so unless some intrepid person wants to try it out, the OP is on their own I'm afraid.

enor

I had a bit of a Google, and I found this, which apparently will invert all the colours (among a great many other things). I've never used it, so unless some intrepid person wants to try it out, the OP is on their own I'm afraid

This looks like just what I'm after, Ive just got to convince the company to buy it now!

Thanks everyone for all of your help and time.