Technical Q&A

TB 62- Setting the Background Color of a Control (3-May-99)

Q: I'm having trouble setting the background color of a control. It looks to me like the control color table contains an entry for background color, but the standard controls seem to be ignoring this entry. What should I do?

A: Unfortunately, since Mac OS 8 and the Appearance SDK were introduced, there are many answers to this question. Without the Appearance extension (whose functionality is built into Mac OS 8.5 and later), controls get their background color from the content entry of the window color table. Otherwise, controls get their background color in a considerably more complicated way, which is best expressed in sample code. We've updated the "ControlBackground" sample accordingly, and it should be appearing on the appropriate Developer CDs and FTP sites soon.