Microsoft’s Dark Mode has permeated throughout many of the company’s services. On Windows and mobile devices, apps have been given the dark treatment. Outlook for iOS is perhaps the most obvious example. Now, Microsoft has open sourced its solution for making apps like Outlook dark, and its called DarkModeKit.
Dark Mode came to Outlook in August 2019 as part of Microsoft’s wider overhaul of the app. Later, the company brought it to iOS. With DarkModeKit, developers have an open source access to the method for implementing Dark Mode on iOS apps.
In other words, the kit allows developers to introduce Dark Mode on their own apps.
Microsoft says DarkModeKit was “designed and developed before Apple‘s official dark mode release”. With the open source kit, developers can build support for dark mode directly into their iOS 11 or later applications.
Furthermore, dev’s can also allow their apps to be switched between light and dark modes without needing to restart the app. According to Microsoft’s, there’s no need to make major code changes to an app as the dark mode is a simply API design.
Dark Mode in iOS 13
As Microsoft noted, Apple has its own dark mode feature available in iOS 13. However, this is for the general theme of the device and not for individual third-party apps. Microsoft’s DarkModeKit will help developers implement dark mode for apps to align with the general look of iOS 13 in its dark mode.
“For more complex scenarios, DarkModeKit is similar to what Apple does in iOS 13 (some slight differences). It maintains a global DMTraitCollection which can be accessed through DMTraitCollection.current during custom layout.”
You can check out DarkModeKit by heading to the official GitHub page here.
