I have been using the 0.8.3 Version for almost 9 years for some small projects. Last week I purchased the latest version to run it on my Mac in native mode.
When I open my existing designs, the colour of the PCB is some odd grey instead of green like in the old version, and the silkscreen is white for some elements and black for others.
I cannot find any way to change the colour of the silkscreen and the PCB. Has the program not progressed that far in 10 years so users can simply change the colours of their PCB design?
0.8.3 is so old I don’t have a copy of it so I can’t see what it did, but since 0.9.2 (the oldest version I have) the pcb has been grey and the silkscreen black. AFAIK the colors are not changeable.
You are well advised to stay with 1.0.4 (the latest version) because development has started again (after stopping in 2016) and there are many serious bugs fixed in the latest version. You may want to try reloading Fritzing and perhaps try clearing the user directories in case there are incompatible settings in the user directories (which contains the settings.) Here are instructions on clearing the user directories (you want to preserve the original directories in case you want to go back to your current version though!)
There are two user directories (with your parts and the parts database) which don’t get touched during an install (to not affect your sketches during upgrades). On Windows they are in
c:\users\username\AppData\Fritzing\roaming\Fritzing (which is a hidden directory so you need to enable hidden directories in explorer) and
c:\Users\username\My Documents\Fritzing (where username is your windows id)
If you don’t have any parts or sketches you want to keep you can just delete those two directories and Fritzing will recreate them, or you can move them aside by renaming them if you want to keep something in them.
It may still be. QT (the framework under Fritzing) sets the directories to hard coded places and in general will use the listed directories for the user information for (I think!) either version so it is possible that you are seeing a conflict there. On 1.0.4 the silkscreen should all be black, the white is from versions earlier than 0.9.2 and I don’t think any of the silkscreen should be white. The most likely cause of that happening is (I think!) a conflict in a setting in the user directories. If you rename the directories so they no longer exist Fritzing will create new copies with the contents 1.0.4 is expecting and that may improve things. The new versions I believe translate the white silkscreen in old parts to black (as some of the parts in core parts still have white silkscreens.) It looks from the screen shot like 0.9.2 had a green background which isn’t in any of the later versions, the pcb background is grey.
It has been for the last couple of years. One of the reasons for upgrading is that after 5 years of trying I managed to recreate (although I didn’t know exactly how I did it) a corruption issue that got fixed (more than 10 years after it was introduced!) in 1.0.1 I think there are also many gerber fixes that have been done in the last few years that make gerber processing much better.
