OS X/OS 9 Finder label inconsistencies: update on "correspondences"
OS X/OS 9 Finder label inconsistencies: update on "correspondences"
- OS 9 => OS X
orange => red
red => orange
pink/magenta => yellow
light blue => green
darker blue => blue
green => purple
brown => gray
We received a number of responses about these color correspondences not being accurate. As we noted yesterday, Mac OS 9 allows the user to customize label colors, which explains why at least some people are seeing different label colors under Mac OS 9 than those listed above. However, MacFixIt reader John Gettler writes that the above list, while being an accurate representation of how label colors are listed in menus in the Finder, isn't actually the correct "map" between OS X and OS 9 labels:
"[That list is simply] the order in which the labels appear in the menus. This part is irrelevant. What is relevant is when you take a folder labeled 'hot' (red) in OS 9.2.2 and move the file to the 10.3.2 environment, which color is it mapped to."
John points out that when you actually compare labeled files between the two systems, red does indeed map to red, and orange to orange, leaving the actual correspondences as:
- OS 9 => OS X
orange => orange
red => red
pink/magenta => yellow
light blue => blue
darker blue=> purple
green => green
brown => gray
John also notes that if you do a lot of cross-OS labeling, you can change the labels on your Mac OS 9 computers so that brown is instead gray, pink/magenta is instead yellow, and the darker blue label is instead purple. After doing this, labels will appear the same in OS 9 and OS X. (As John pointed out, you need to use the table above to match colors, not the order labels appear in Finder menus.)
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