title: Mimicking Acrylic in a Win32 app
body: <p>Microsoft recently announced <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/uwp/style/acrylic" rel="noreferrer">Acrylic, the glass-like material in Fluent Design</a>.  It's presented as XAML / UWP only, but looks very similar to glass, except it can be arbitrarily tinted and can apply in-app to flyover controls as well as to the app's standalone windows.</p>
  
  <p>The 'recipe' makes it appear as though it's <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/uwp/style/acrylic#how-we-designed-acrylic" rel="noreferrer">implemented in XAML itself</a>, not being exposed to the wider system.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/S5jwS.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/S5jwS.png" alt="Microsoft&#39;s recipe for making acrylic: background, blue, blend, tint, noise"></a></p>
  
  <p>A related SO question <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43931709/acrylic-material-in-win32-app">confirms this</a> (it's devoid of concrete, technical answers, but implies acrylic isn't available through the WinAPI the way glass is.)</p>
  
  <p><strong>How would someone mimic this in a plain old Win32 app?</strong>  Using glass, and blending?  (Which APIs, and <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32724187/how-do-you-set-the-glass-blend-colour-on-windows-10">what's possible in Win10 Fall Update's glass APIs that was not in Win7?</a>)  If the app was created with Win32 but used a DirectX surface for rendering, would it open more possibilities?</p>