Translucency was one number serving both appearances and both platforms,
resting at zero. A lever that starts at zero is a feature nobody finds, and
one number cannot serve four situations: a tint that reads as a whisper over
a dark palette is a milky sheet over a light one, and the same numbers that
read as frost on macOS vibrancy read as a washed sheet over Windows acrylic,
which composites its own tint in DWM before the page is drawn.
So the state splits. `mode` stays global — clear versus glass is a choice
about the window, not the palette — while the values resolve through a
ladder, per key: the appearance you are looking at, then a shared base, then
the platform default. Tuning light mode stays in light mode; an untouched
dark keeps inheriting. A v1 state lands in base, so a window someone already
tuned crosses the upgrade with exactly what was on screen.
Main reads the same defaults at window creation, because a window born
opaque cannot reliably be swapped to glass afterwards.
The chat backdrop goes off by default in the same pass: it was competing
with the glass field for the same surface.
Brooklyn Nicholson
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