QuickLook-Next 5.3.0
Readability: no more washed-out panels on a bright wallpaper
The material itself is untouched — the tray menu keeps the 30% WCA acrylic it was tuned to. What
changed is the surfaces that are read rather than scanned: the plugin manager, the update prompt,
the download panel, data & cache and the OCR panel move to a 45% panel tint, and text-heavy
areas sit on a content plate (a white card in the light theme, a soft black one in the dark
theme). The plugin list and the OCR text box are the first users.
Secondary text was raised from #9E9E9E / #7A7A7A to #C8C8C8 / #5C5C5C. It used to assume a
solid background, which is exactly why version numbers and dialog body text disappeared on a bright
wallpaper in the dark theme.
One fallback that was always missing is in too: when Windows' transparency effects are off, these
panels become solid. DWM stops blurring in that state, so an acrylic surface degenerates into a
30–45% tint — worse than having the blur. They now fall back to the theme's own surface colour.
Preview caption bar
- A gradient scrim behind the bar (theme-aware). The image viewer switches the bar's glass off,
which left white icons floating directly on the picture — "open with" and "extract text" were
already hard to see on light content. - The two left buttons lost their "big glyph + 0.25-scaled badge" construction and are single
glyphs whose active state is the accent colour (pin to top: the arrow turns accent; prevent
closing: the pin fills and turns accent). That badge trick was the only place in the app using it
and it read as noise at 100% scaling. - The bar is grouped: file actions (share / open / open with / reload / OCR / more) and window
actions (theme / maximise / close), separated by a 1 px hairline. - The title has a hierarchy: the "6000x4000:" prefix is secondary, the file name primary.
Button hover went from a square fill to the app's 4 px rounded language.
Plugin manager
- A glyph per family (image / video / document / PDF / font / archive / table / code /
certificate / mail …) instead of 25 identical puzzle pieces. - The per-row "Built-in" badge is gone (the header already counts them); only user-installed plugins
are marked "User". ChmViewer 0.0.0.0is no longer shown — that is a plugin without anAssemblyVersion, and it read
like a defect in the panel.- The list sits on a content plate, and the row icons are quieter (they used to be bright white
squares with grey glyphs).
Tray menu
- The icon column is a fixed 16 px grid: every glyph has a different advance width, so the two
sections used to start a few pixels apart. - The version at the top is no longer dimmed to 50% — it was almost invisible on a light wallpaper.
Verification
- Unit tests 87/87.
- Six surfaces checked as screenshots: preview window, tray menu, plugin manager, update prompt,
data & cache, OCR. - The packaged build ran image and Markdown previews with an empty log; in-package version 5.3.0.
- Honest limitation: the machine's wallpaper is dark, so the extreme "bright wallpaper + dark theme"
case is guaranteed by construction (content plate + 45% panel tint + brighter secondary text)
rather than observed here.
Upgrading
Version 5.3.0. This is a look-and-feel update; behaviour is identical to 5.2.0 (low memory mode,
OCR and the preview sizing logic are unchanged). Automatic update installs straight over the top.