About the Gray Council

The Gray Council is a set of C++ classes providing the premiere implementation of the "Apple Grayscale Appearance". The AGA is Apple's grayscale visual user interface specification, recommended for use in today's applications when not coding directly to the Appearance Manager. Prior to publication of the AGA, developers had to design their own grayscale look and feel, which led to inconsistencies between apps, and many ugly grayscale implementations.

But while Apple has now published the visual specifications, developers are on their own to implement it, and it is a lot of work. The Gray Council provides this for you, with C++ source code that implements the complete AGA in an elegantly designed and implemented set of classes.

The core Gray Council classes use the Mac toolbox only, and do not rely on any application framework's view system. Framework "adapter" classes are provided to easily drop the Gray Council into both PowerPlant and MacApp applications; for standard system controls you need only change the class ID or class name of an object in the framework's visual editor (i.e., PowerPlant/Constructor or MacApp/AdLib). It's really that simple to use! Another adapter is provided that makes it easy to use the Gray Council with standard Mac toolbox Dialog Manager alerts and dialogs, using unmodified dialog resources. It also makes it easy to add the complex new controls to a dialog.

You can see screen shots of the Gray Council AGA controls in the linked page below. The controls include: push buttons, with optional default outline; check boxes, with mixed-state capability; radio buttons, with mixed-state capability; icon buttons with push, check, or radio button behavior; scroll bars with options for live scrolling and proportional thumb; sliders, with options for live tracking and proportional indicator; popup menus; little arrows; disclosure triangles; determinate and indeterminate progress indicators; separators; primary and secondary group boxes; large and small tab panels; view borders; window backgrounds.

The Gray Council classes require Color QuickDraw and System 7, and support multiple screen devices including 1-bit drawing and monitor spanning. System 6 and Classic QuickDraw have not been tested, and would probably need a little work to be compatible.

The supplied MacApp 3.3.3, MacApp r12, PowerPlant 1.6, and straight Dialog Manager test programs have been compiled and tested using CodeWarrior 11 targeting both 68K and PowerPC. The Gray Council can be added to MacApp and PowerPlant applications very easily to turn non-AGA applications written with these frameworks into AGA applications.

If you're using MacApp r13 or later, you don't need the Gray Council. Apple Computer, Inc. has licensed the Gray Council and has integrated it directly into the MacApp ACS starting with r13.

For use in publicly distributed shareware/freeware applications, The Gray Council is free; you need only show the copyright string in your credits and inform me of where to download the program (if you'd rather not hassle with this, just register a copy of The Gray Council). For commercial or in-house developers, The Gray Council is priced at $10 per developer. Site licenses are $100. There are no runtime fees. Source and object code redistribution licensing is also available. The details of the licensing requirements are described in the documentation contained in the distribution package.

To register your copy instantly and securely, please visit the online registration page. You can also use the Register application that is part of the download package; it will let you send an email to register, or print out a hardcopy to mail in.