NSColor

NSColor is a class in Apple’s AppKit framework that represents colors used in macOS applications. It serves as the macOS counterpart to UIColor in UIKit and is the primary object for specifying colors in views, drawing, and controls. NSColor can represent solid colors, patterns, and dynamic colors that adapt to appearance changes such as light and dark mode.

The class provides a range of initialization options for creating colors from different color spaces and components. Developers can construct colors from RGB or grayscale components, or use pattern images to fill areas with repeating imagery. NSColor also supports conversion and manipulation across color spaces through associated NSColorSpace objects and related methods, and it can expose its color components via methods that retrieve red, green, blue, and alpha values when applicable. For interoperability, NSColor can be bridged to Core Graphics as a CGColor and to Swift in a natural, type-safe way.

NSColor includes support for system and named colors. It offers a set of standard system colors that respond to appearance and accessibility settings, and colors can also be loaded from asset catalogs by name. Dynamic colors, introduced to integrate with macOS appearance changes, allow colors to switch appropriate values automatically when the user changes themes.

In usage, NSColor is commonly employed to set fill and stroke colors in drawing code, to configure UI elements, and to provide colors for text and backgrounds. It can be created programmatically, loaded from resources, or obtained from system-defined colors, and can be serialized for persistence.