Light, dark and your own colour

Rally has three settings that change how it looks. Two of them are about this Mac: whether the app is light or dark, and which icon sits in your Dock. The third, your personal colour, belongs to you and travels with your account.

Light or dark#

Open Settings → Application and find the heading Appearance ("Make Rally feel at home on this Mac"). The Appearance control has three choices:

Hover over a choice to see that description as a tooltip. The line underneath confirms what you picked: "Following this Mac, which is light right now." for System, or "Always light." or "Always dark." for the other two.

The change happens at once, in every Rally window you have open, including Settings itself.

System follows the Mac all day#

System is not a third look. It always comes out as light or dark, whichever your Mac is using at that moment. If you have set macOS to switch between light and dark automatically through the day (in the Mac's own System Settings → Appearance), Rally switches with it. Choose System once and you never have to think about it again, which is the best kind of setting.

There are no other themes#

If you are looking for a theme picker with names like "Ocean" or "Midnight", this is it. Rally has one look, drawn in a light version and a dark version. The Settings search knows this too: type "theme" and it takes you to Appearance. If you used an early version of Rally that offered more, your old choice has been turned into the matching light or dark setting.

Your personal colour#

Your colour is separate from Appearance and works in both light and dark. You picked one when you set up your profile in the guided setup, and you can change it any time in Settings → Account, on the Color row ("Your avatar and personal accent color"). Click a swatch; the chosen one gets a tick.

There are eight: rose, orange, lime, emerald, blue, violet, fuchsia and black.

Your colour does two jobs:

• It is how teammates spot you. Your avatar wears it everywhere your name appears.
• It tints your copy of Rally. Your own message bubbles and the accents on controls, such as links, checkboxes and highlights, take on your colour. When Rally asks you a question with options, hovering an answer shows a light wash of it too.

The effect is deliberately gentle. Lists, selected rows and hover highlights stay a neutral grey, so the app does not turn entirely fuchsia on you, however much you might want it to.

Your colour is stored on your account, so it follows you to every computer you sign in on.

The app icon#

Rally comes with seven icons for the Dock, Finder, Launchpad and Spotlight. Find them under Settings → Application → App icon:

• Light
• Dark
• Calm
• Ludicrous speed
• Homage
• Builder
• Quiet

Click one and it bounces to say it has been picked. The Dock changes straight away. Ludicrous speed does not make Rally any faster, but it does make the Dock look like it is about to.

Out of the box, Rally chooses for you: the Light icon when your Mac is in light mode and Dark in dark mode. The line under the icons says so, for example "Using light automatically with the system appearance."

Picking an icon fixes it, whatever the Mac's appearance. To go back to the automatic behaviour, click Use the system icon, which appears under the icons once you have chosen one.

The icon picker is a Mac feature. Anywhere else, the section says "Custom app icons are available in the macOS app."