settings & customization

Settings isn't a separate page - it's an inline panel in MainPage, made of five collapsible rows: Appearance, Data Storage, Live Tile, Welcome Dialog, and About. Everything here is backed by ApplicationData.LocalSettings, so it's per-user, per-machine, and wiped if you uninstall the app. The code lives split across Views\MainPage.Appearance.cs and Views\MainPage.Settings.cs.

appearance

theme

Three options - System default, Light, Dark - saved under the AppTheme key.

Applying a theme sets RequestedTheme on the root frame, not on the app. since: Application.RequestedTheme can only be set before the app's first frame exists, so changing it at runtime would need a restart. Setting it on the root frame flows down to everything and takes effect instantly.

Changing the theme also triggers two follow-ups:

• the custom title bar colours get recalculated (UpdateTitleBarColors)
• the tint colour is re-applied, because each tint has separate light/dark shades (see below)

accent tint

Eleven swatches: Default, plus ten named presets - Blue, Purple, Green, Red, Slate, Teal, Bronze, Rose, Olive, and Graphite - and a custom swatch that opens a full colour picker. The value saved under AppTintColor is the actual hex string used as the button's Tag (or "Default").

Picking anything other than Default builds a new AcrylicBrush at runtime and assigns it to RootGrid.Background. Picking Default restores the untinted window acrylic. There's only ever one AcrylicBrush instance for this, repainted in place rather than rebuilt per pick - a HostBackdrop brush is backed by a composition effect sampling the desktop, so rebuilding it on every colour-picker drag would be the most expensive thing the appearance code does.

The interesting bit is that each preset is really two colours (woah shocking):

swatch	dark theme	light theme
Blue	#1E3A5F	#C8E0F5
Purple	#2D1B69	#DDD0F5
Green	#0F3D2E	#C5E8D5
Red	#3D1515	#F5CECE
Slate (fort.ind's og colour :3)	#1A1A2E	#D0D0EA
Teal	#0E3A3A	#C5E8E8
Bronze	#3D2A0F	#F5E3C0
Rose	#3D1533	#F5CEE9
Olive	#2E3D0F	#DEEBC0
Graphite	#232323	#DCDCDC

The dark hex is what's stored; when the effective theme is light, a lookup table swaps in the pale equivalent. Tint opacity changes too - 0.8 in dark, 0.85 in light for a coloured tint (the untinted Default is 0.8 in both) - since the same opacity over a light backdrop washes out completely otherwise.

"Effective theme" here means: if the frame is set to Default, fall back to checking Application.Current.RequestedTheme, otherwise use the frame's value. That check shows up in a few places because ElementTheme.Default doesn't tell you which theme you actually got.

custom tint

The eleventh swatch opens a ColorPicker dialog (hex input included!) seeded with whatever colour was last picked - either your last custom colour, or the current preset's dark hex if you're switching from a preset. Dragging the picker previews the tint live against the window in real time via the picker's ColorChanged event; cancelling restores whatever tint was active before you opened the dialog. Confirming saves the hex under AppCustomTintColor and it becomes the new AppTintColor.

The selected swatch is marked with a border that's white in dark mode and black in light mode, which is why switching themes also refreshes the selection highlight.

note

The acrylic uses HostBackdrop, meaning it samples your desktop wallpaper behind the window, not the app's own content. If transparency effects are off in Windows Settings, the FallbackColor (the flat tint colour) is used instead.

data storage

Read-only info plus one destructive button:

• Location - the app's local folder path, from LocalStorageService.DataPath
• Status - whether you're logged in, and as who (@username@social.fort1nd.com)
• Clear login info - only visible while logged in

Clearing login info shows a confirmation dialog first, then calls ProfileService.LogoutAsync - which drops the token from the Credential Vault and deletes the cached profile JSON (and pops a "Signed out, goodbye!" toast). Worth knowing: this doesn't deauthorize the app on fort.social's side. The dialog says so, and the app can't do it itself since it only holds read:account. To fully revoke, go to fort.social → profile → service integration and unlink there. See sign-in & accounts.

reset app

Next to Clear login info is a Reset app button, it's the more destructive of the two. Where "clear login info" only touches your account session, this wipes everything the app has ever written locally: the auth token, the cached profile, the sitemap cache, the cached avatar image, and every LocalSettings value - theme, tint, panel-expanded states, the welcome-dialog flag, all of it. It leaves the app in the same state as a fresh install. Like clear login info, it has no effect on your fort.social account itself.

Because that's irreversible, it's gated behind 2 separate confirmations rather than one:

1. An explainer dialog describing what gets deleted
2. A final "are you REALLYYYY sure" dialog with no way back after this point

Once the wipe runs (ProfileService.ResetAppDataAsync → LocalStorageService.ResetAllAppDataAsync, which deletes everything in the local folder and clears LocalSettings.Values outright), the appearance settings are immediately reloaded from those now-empty defaults and a third dialog offers to restart the app right away via CoreApplication.RequestRestartAsync. A restart isn't strictly required - the reset already applied to this running session - but it's offered because a handful of things are only guaranteed consistent after a fresh process start.

accessibility

Every settings row header and the tint swatches carry AutomationProperties.Name/HelpText, so a screen reader announces what a row does before it's expanded, not just its label. The tint swatches take this further: since the selected swatch is otherwise only indicated by a border color, the selected swatch's automation name gets a " (selected)" suffix appended at runtime - a sighted user sees the highlight, a screen reader user gets the equivalent via the announced name.

live tile

Three controls:

• Refresh - re-runs the live tile update, pushing the news content back onto the tile in case if its fucked up
• Clear - clears the live tile back to just the app logo, and clears the taskbar badge too
• Show taskbar badge toggle - turns the little notification badge on the taskbar icon on or off (ShowTileBadge, defaults on). Turning it off immediately clears any badge that's currently showing.

These exist mostly because live tiles are easy to get into a fucked state, and because there's no other way to force an update without relaunching.

welcome dialog

The first-run dialog has a "dont show me this again" checkbox that writes HideWelcomeDialog = True. This row's button flips it back to False and immediately re-shows the dialog, so it's both a reset and a preview.

The dialog itself is built from a DataTemplate stamped fresh on every show (a reused ContentDialog instance stops replaying its entrance animation) - three Segoe MDL2 icons, the beta blurb, and the checkbox.

All dialogs in the app go through a shared DialogService, which owns one process-wide SemaphoreSlim gate, so a second dialog attempt while one is open just returns instead of throwing. UWP only permits one ContentDialog at a time and will otherwise raise an exception.

about

Shows the version string from AppConstants.AppVersionDisplay and links out to the site, the GitHub repo, and the GitHub issues page.

The version is read from the package manifest at runtime (Package.Current.Id.Version, formatted Major.Minor.Build) rather than being hardcoded, so the About screen can't drift from what CI actually built. There's a hardcoded fallback for the unpackaged case, and a VersionChannel suffix constant if you want to append something like "Beta".

how the rows work

Each row is a header you tap to expand, with a chevron that rotates 0° → 90°. Expanded state is persisted per row:

row	LocalSettings key
Appearance	SettingsAppearanceExpanded
Data Storage	SettingsStorageExpanded
Live Tile	SettingsTileExpanded
Welcome Dialog	SettingsWelcomeExpanded
About	SettingsAboutExpanded

RestoreSettingsPanelStates runs at startup and reapplies all five. Rows with no saved key keep their XAML default, so a fresh install isn't forced into a particular layout.

the _loadingSettings flag

Worth understanding before you add a setting. LoadAppearanceSettings sets _loadingSettings = true while restoring state, because assigning IsChecked on a radio button fires its Checked handler - which would immediately write the value back to LocalSettings and, worse, could clobber a saved value with a default during startup. (not fun)

So the pattern for any new setting is:

• the handler early-returns (or skips its save) when _loadingSettings is true
• the restore path is wrapped in try/finally so the flag always gets cleared

ApplyTheme and ApplyTintColor both follow this - they apply the visual change unconditionally, but only persist when the flag is clear.

adding a setting

1. Add a key constant to AppConstants.cs - don't inline the string, the whole file exists to stop that drift
2. Add the control to the relevant row in MainPage.xaml, with an x:Uid if it shows any text - display strings live in Strings\en-US\Resources.resw, not inline (see contributing)
3. Write an apply method that guards its save with _loadingSettings
4. Restore it in LoadAppearanceSettings
5. Add SearchItem entries so it's findable - see search