Placeholder Text Color?

[Chris Knight]

Hi,

I am creating a form layout and wish to design it with a Dark Theme. I personally have come to really appreciate (and thus use) applications that allow me reduce and preferable eliminate the eye-strian caused by predominantly white GUIs. I have not tried this previously in Tap Forms quite like I am going about it now so I don’t know how feasible it will end up being but right out of the gate I have found that I cannot figure out how to change the color of Placeholder Text.

To conserve space on forms I like the “Show Title as Placeholder” feature, however because I have decided that I really want a truly dark theme, the default black text color does not show up well on my dark background. I could make the background lighter but that totally defeats the whole purpose of the dark theme. So the obvious choice and preferable choice is to change that placeholder text color to a lighter color. But it is not mentioned anywhere I can find in the user guide and no hits for it with my forum search and it certainly has not been obvious in the GUI how to change it. Is it hard-coded? Can I not choose the color for it?

Thank you kindly in advance,
~Chris

PS I would really like to put my vote in for a true dark theme in TapForms for Mac. The dark sidebar is an improvement but the majority of the GUI is still too bright for my aging eyes.

[Brendan]

Hi Chris,

I don’t set any colour at all for the placeholder text. That’s just what the operating system chooses.

I’ll see if there’s a way to set the placeholder text colour.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Chris Knight]

Hi Brendan,

Thank you for looking into it, I will look forward to the enhancement.

Thanks,
~Chris

[Brendan]

So I found out a way to do it, but it’ll take a bit of work because it works in one situation, but not in the way I’m doing things. So I’ll have to change how I’m setting the placeholder value. Haven’t had a chance to dig into figuring out how to do that just yet though.

[Chris Knight]

I truly appreciate the effort you are putting into it.

I have been working on putting together a form layout with a dark theme to it and have run into several issues and have been taking some notes as they come up. I am testing my compromise layout now by entering data into it and tweaking the layout as I find things don’t work quite the way I expected with field size and the like. I am going to send the notes to you in an email in the next day or two after I check over them for errors as several of the issues also have to do with color issues here and there.

Thanks again,
~Chris

[Brendan]

Ya, Tap Forms wasn’t really designed for a fully dark theme. I do have the forms list which you can make dark, but that’s about it. Dark themes actually hurt my eyes, so I never use them.

[Brendan]

Hi Chris,

I figured out a relatively simple way to set the placeholder colour depending on the fill colour of the field. If it’s a dark colour, white will be used. If it’s a light colour, black will be used for the placeholder text colour.

If there’s no fill colour, the default light grey colour will be used.

Would that suffice for you for now?

[Chris Knight]

Hi Brendan,

I think it will at least be more visible than the black on “lead” that I have right now. I am actually removing the fills from all form fields and setting the background color to “lead” from Apple’s crayon colors. I only have one field I have to edit then if I want to change the background of everything but so far I am liking this background. Ideally, one would be able to set it someplace for total control but I think the logic you are talking about makes sense and certainly will suffice for now. I really appreciate it.

I know there are still a lot of people who do prefer light colored backgrounds like you. Although, there really is a growing number that are preferring dark ones. Even Apple is currently working on dark themes for some of the built-in apps in OS X instead of just their pro apps. I read that the new api is already deep in High Safari but not yet made easily available to the user since it is still in testing/development.

When I was a lot younger my first computer had a black CRT with green text and at some point next I had a greyscale CRT and then eventually color. None of it bothered me then. Now days my desk has an 27″iMac and 27″IPS and 20″ LCD and my eyes hurt a lot if they are all bright. My wife has 32″ IPS and doesn’t prefers white backgrounds because that is what she is used to but I have turn her resolution down because the higher resolution of the 32″ over her old 20″ hurts her eyes regardless of the predominant color scheme. Everyone is a little different I suppose.

Thanks again for all your work on this. I am looking forward to the update and I’m glad you found an easy way to do for the time being.
~Chris

[Author]

Posts