The Appearance Manager coordinates the look of human interface elements on the Mac OS and provides the underlying support for appearances and themes. Themes bundle additional user preferences regarding such interface aspects as sounds, desktop pictures or patterns, and system fonts. The Appearance Manager also provides many standard human interface elements, such as focus rings and group boxes, that can eliminate the need to create and maintain your own custom solutions.
Many programs exclusively use standard, system-defined interface elements.
If yours is one of these, you may need only to register your program with the Appearance Manager and be prepared to respond to Appearance Manager Apple events in order to coordinate with the systemwide look, that is, to be theme-compliant. However, if your program uses any custom interface elements, you may need to use other features of the Appearance Manager for your program to be theme-compliant. This document describes how you can coordinate the appearance of your application program with the look of the standard Mac OS human interface. The Appearance Manager provides the underlying support for themes, which unify the appearance of human interface objects in your application, including windows, menus, dialog boxes, controls, alert icons, and background colors. This document describes how to design your application for the Mac OS X user interface, known as Aqua.