PATH Carbon Developer Documentation > Human Interface Toolbox> Appearance Manager

The Appearance Manager coordinates the look of human interface elements on the Mac OS and provides the underlying support for appearances and themes. Appearances unify the look of human interface elements in your program and across the system--including alert icons, controls, background colors, dialog boxes, menus, windows, and state transitions--thus giving the user a consistent experience. Themes bundle additional user preferences regarding such interface aspects as sounds, desktop pictures or patterns, and system fonts. You can use the Appearance Manager to adapt any nonstandard interface elements in your program to the same coordinated look as the rest of the Mac OS. The Appearance Manager also provides many standard human interface elements, such as focus rings and group boxes, that can eliminate the need to create and maintain your own custom solutions. Many programs exclusively use standard, system-defined interface elements. If yours is one of these, you may need only to register your program with the Appearance Manager and be prepared to respond to Appearance Manager Apple events in order to coordinate with the systemwide look, that is, to be theme-compliant. However, if your program uses any custom interface elements, you may need to use other features of the Appearance Manager for your program to be theme-compliant.

Appearance Manager Reference This document describes the Appearance Manager application programming interface, through Appearance Manager 1.1.   Programming with the Appearance Manager This document describes how you can coordinate the appearance of your application program with the look of the standard Mac OS human interface. The Appearance Manager provides the underlying support for themes, which unify the appearance of human interface objects in your application, including windows, menus, dialog boxes, controls, alert icons, and background colors. You can order a printed version of this book by visiting the ADC Developer Library site, hosted by Fatbrain.com.   Adopting the Aqua Interface (Preliminary) [PDF] This document describes how, in the process of creating a Cocoa application or revising your Mac OS 8 and 9 application for Carbon, you can take full advantage of Aqua in Mac OS X.