<Swing Dev> [jdk16] RFR: 8251377: [macos11] JTabbedPane selected tab text is barely legible

[Phil Race]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2020 10:41:04 GMT, Prasanta Sadhukhan <psadhukhan at openjdk.org> wrote:

> Please review a fix for jdk16.
> On macOS 11 (bigsur), using the Swing Aqua Look and Feel, the text of the selected JTabbedPane tab title text is just a light gray outline of white text on a white background. The macOS 11 design inverted from dark background / light text to light background / dark text, so white text on white background is not legible.
> Correct system color to use for this scenario, as per Apple, is [NSColor controlTextColor]
> so the proposed fix is to use this system color for BigSur. 
> For preBigSur releases, "white" is still used as the above color is for text color but the tabPane background color is still not readable through any Apple API, so [NSColor controlTextColor] which returns black will not be legible on preBigSur releases which has black background.

> _Mailing list message from [Alan Snyder](mailto:javalists at cbfiddle.com) on [swing-dev](mailto:swing-dev at openjdk.java.net):_
> 
> What alternative are you proposing? I don?t believe there is any option that is guaranteed not to require changing
> for some future release of macOS without some new API from Apple, e.g. ?selectedTabTextColor?.

Alan,
We contacted Apple and this is their recommendation since there is no way to future-proof it.

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PR: https://git.openjdk.java.net/jdk16/pull/65