Minor issue: Alfred may forget to update some of its UI if system toggles appearance

[Chris Messina]

I activated Alfred but then put my display to sleep. When I returned, my system had toggled from light to dark appearance, and it seemed like the active search for Alfred had made the switch, but the rest of Alfred hadn't:

 

Update: same thing happened when macOS toggled in the opposite direction:

 

Edited December 26, 2020 by Chris Messina
adding other screenshot

[Andrew]

@Chris Messina I'm still trying to reproduce this, can I ask some more questions:

• Do you see this with all themes, or just specific ones?
• Does Alfred's default themes exhibit this issue?
• On hiding then re-showing Alfred is it back to normal? Or do you need to do something specific to kick things back to normal?

Cheers,

Andrew

[deanishe]

9 minutes ago, Andrew said:

On hiding then re-showing Alfred is it back to normal?

 

Yup. The sleep is irrelevant, I believe. The colours in Alfred's main window don't fully update if it's open when macOS switches themes.

 

9 minutes ago, Andrew said:

Do you see this with all themes, or just specific ones?

 

I've seen it with both custom themes that I use (on Catalina).

Edited December 29, 2020 by deanishe

[Andrew]

@deanishe hmm yeah, I can see that now... I'm not sure how "fixable" this is when there is a different backing view (e.g. visual light -> visual dark), as the window would need to be hidden.

 

I'm interested in if just hiding and re-showing fixes it for @Chris Messina, as if it doesn't that's a more serious issue.

 

I'll see what I can do to minimise the impact of this.

[deanishe]

5 minutes ago, Andrew said:

I'm interested in if just hiding and re-showing fixes it

 

Does for me. That's why I never reported the issue.

[Andrew]

I think the way I'll fix this is make Alfred hold on to the currently visible theme until re-shown, so if it switches while Alfred is visible, the current theme is retained until the next time you show Alfred. This will at least stop mixed elements.

[Chris Messina]

4 hours ago, Andrew said:

I'm interested in if just hiding and re-showing fixes it for @Chris Messina, as if it doesn't that's a more serious issue.

 

Yes, hiding/showing Alfred refreshes the display. It is a minor issue (as I mentioned in the topic title) but still seems like erroneous/undesirable behavior (though likely not very common).

[Chris Messina]

Quote

• Cache the active theme in Alfred to prevent partial theme changing on automatic macOS Light / Dark mode update

 

Whohoo! Spotted in Alfred 4.3.1 [1208]