Max 9: Old patchers open with new colors

As previously mentioned on this thread, this is not a new issue. It is only brought more to the foreground now that the default theme has changed. Sorry for the inconvenience. While it might seem like an arbitrary change without consideration of historical defaults, actually, lots of time and energy went in to try and make themes work well for users of all needs and preferences. We started in 8.6 building robust theming support with many more themes available, including the often requested dark objects on dark patcher background theme as well as the ability for Max to follow Live themes. In Max 9 we changed the default theme as encouraged by many users.

In general, patches which make assumptions about theme colors need to be changed to be robustly theme compatible and/or theme agnostic. This has always been the case, but has traditionally been masked by no officially supported theme with a dark background color prior to Max 8.6.

I'll try to outline a variety of options and recommended strategies:

• For your own personal projects, you can simply change the theme to your preferred style. For example the "max8" or "dark-over-light" themes will most closely match default Max 8 theme behavior.

• For patchers which are intended to be shared with others, there are a number of strategies outlined in the Max 8.6 documentation (some of this has not yet been migrated in the Max 9 documentation reworking and this thread is a helpful reminder to us to work on that). I'll quote here for convenience. In order to make a device properly themed for Ableton (or Max) and robust in regard to theme changes, one of the following options should be followed for each UI element in your device (or patch):

  1. Use the default colors for all of a given UI element's colors. This should always follow the theme according to default theming behavior. If you require always dark or always light colors, please use appropriate dynamic colors that match these needs (see option #2).

  2. Use appropriate dynamic colors for all colors in any given UI element. This is especially important for any foreground and background colors. This allows for robust theme following, with different rules than the standard theme following behavior.

  3. Use fixed custom colors for all colors in any given UI element. This is especially important for any foreground and background colors. In this case, the colors will not adapt based on themes, but they will always use the authored colors and look the same under all themes.

• From your description, it sounds like your situation with desired fixed colors is best suited for strategy #3 to be theme agnostic (avoiding dynamic colors and general theme compatibility). You can handle this by setting the default colors in your patcher's patcher inspector, or by making use of patcher styles.

• If on the other hand you would like to try using strategy #1, you can in each of your patchers use the "Object -> Set Colors to Default Values" with no objects selected and it will be applied to your entire patcher.

• For any of the above 3 strategies, you can use javascript to iterate through your patcher and make changes to set specific colors or set colors to default values as desired. Below I'll include an example that could be used as a basis for further customization that you could place within a patch and execute to manage your colors.

function bang()
{
  force_patcher_colors(this.patcher);
  // applydeep will call the function on all objects 
  // and recursively descend into subpatchers
  this.patcher.applydeep(apply_colors);
}

function apply_colors(o)
{
  var p = o.subpatcher();
  if (p) {
    force_patcher_colors(p);
  }

  return true;
}

function force_patcher_colors(p)
{
  p.setattr("style", "");

  p.setattrdefault("locked_bgcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("editing_bgcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("accentcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("bgcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("bgfillcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("color");
  p.setattrdefault("elementcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("selectioncolor");
  p.setattrdefault("patchlinecolor");
  p.setattrdefault("textcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("textcolor_inverse");
  p.setattrdefault("clearcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("stripecolor");
  p.setattrdefault("bubble_bgcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("bubble_outlinecolor");
  p.setattrdefault("syntax_attrargcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("syntax_attributecolor");
  p.setattrdefault("syntax_objargcolor");
  p.setattrdefault("syntax_objectcolor");

  // alternatively could set colors explicitly
  // e.g. make the patcher bgcolor and comment 
  // text color fixed regardless of theme defaults
  //p.setattr("locked_bgcolor", [0.7, 0.8, 0.8, 1.]);
  //p.setattr("editing_bgcolor", [0.7, 0.8, 0.8, 1.]);
  //p.setattr("textcolor", [0.4, 0.1, 0.1, 1.]);

  return true;
}

Hopefully this information is helpful.