Consistent colors in GUI across systems

I'm working on a cross platform GUIDE based application.

My development system is MacOS Lion. When I run the application on that system the GUI looks good (at least to me). However, when I run it on a different version of Matlab or different OS background colors seem to be chosen at random.

If I explicitly set the background color, even to the exact value it shows on my development system it is consistent. But, I have a googol or two widget in this thing.

On MacOS-Snow Leopard, backgrounds are darker (170,170,170 instead of 237,237,237).

On Windows XP, Win 7, Ubuntu 11.04 the button colors are using the "Angry Fruit Salad" color map, some are gray, some are red, yellow, orange, purple and the backgrounds to msgbox are as dark as on Snow Leopard.

Is there any alternative to setting every single background in GUIDE and explicitly modifying each msgbox and other pop-ups?

Thanks, Joe

[Joseph Areeda]

I've been following Sean's advice and editing a lot of buttons. We will see if getting it to look right on Ubuntu affects how it looks on the other systems.

I learned that the rainbow of button colors has something to do with which panel they are in. We highlight the different panels with different colors. It seems some, not all of the buttons are using the parent panel's highlight color as their background color on Ubuntu and Windows but not Macs.

I have no idea who that makes sense to.

Joe

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

You could manually set the default colors for the root. This could be dangerous to other applications though:

set(0,'defaultfigurecolor',[0 0 0.6])

etc. Same for uicontrols and others. I would recommend manually doing it in GUIDE though. If you do this and want your original figure color back:

get(0,'defaultfigurecolor');

[Joseph Areeda]

Thank you Sean!

I will read up on defaultfigurecolor but I'm confused by the whole issue right now.

I don't understand where the different colors are coming from. It's not like very button gets set to the same color. On the Ubuntu box I'm writing right now what appears as a consistent shade of gray in the MacOS Lion machine I have at work are either yellow, magenta, light blue, dark blue or red.

How will the defaultfigurecolor affect all of these?

Also the background of dialogs created in GUIDE or using msgbox is different. That means everytime a msg is popped up I have to grab the handle and set the background color (at least).

I thought it might have something to do with the System Default Window styles but I can't relate those colors to any widget in any other GUI.

Joe

[Joseph Areeda]

Oh yeah.

I just took over this project which has been an on going development for years. I'm not sure one person has done the cross platform check and commented on this before.

That's part of my reluctance to go in and modify everything that interacts with the user. It seems very invasive and error prone.

Joe

[Sean de Wolski]

I would guess it does, that and themes. Perhaps a good way to dig for it would be to get the default figure (and uicontrol uipanel etc.) color on all three systems - it may have been set by someone else and the OS themes might affect it.