0to255 | Hacker News Reader

0to255

0to255.com

236 pointskylebragger45 comments

I'm surprised that people don't seem to like this as much as I do. Yes, a designer is obviously going to use a more powerful tool, but that doesn't really say anything about how useful this is. I'm constantly writing small web apps and I have absolutely no design sense whatsoever. Having a really simple, elegant tool that lets me randomly choose a color and view a few shades lighter or darker is a huge help. It's got a nice, simple UI and does one thing very well. I'll definitely be using it.

And for those of you linking to other tools, they all either a) have a poor UI or b) do too much. That's not to say that they don't have their place, but they just don't do the same thing as this.

I agree it's a useful tool. However, I'm usually choosing a bunch of colors, and it helps if you're seeing the colors in context.

What I'd really love is a color-dropper plugin that lets me choose a random color on a webpage, and change every pixel of that color to a different one specified by me.

SASS does something close with its CSS variables, but it lacks the real-time interaction.

Sorry this is so off-topic, this seemed so close...

My thoughts exactly. Thanks for the good feedback :)

Okay, I'm intrigued. What can this possibly be doing that requires so many individual Flash items?

It's to enable click-to-copy (to the clipboard.)

I'm not going to pretend that HTML5+Javascript can easily replication Flash functionality, but I'm pretty sure it can handle copy-to-clipboard.

Edit forehead slap. The last time I had to write a script to copy to clipboard was several years ago and I was targeting the script for IE on a company intranet. I stand humbly (and foolishly) corrected.

Hm, that would be great — I'd love to see an example of this.

Typically you'll get a selection object, get the range object, and .execCommand("Copy") on it. Unfortunately it only really works in IE (afaik); it used to work in FF if you got the Allow Clipboard Access plugin, but even that's been disabled.

It could potentially be a huge security risk, which is why it's had to be sandboxed into plugins like flash.

>It could potentially be a huge security risk,

Why is copying data into the clipboard a security risk?

> which is why it's had to be sandboxed into plugins like flash.

But it's already in a sandbox (the browser). Why do we need a sandbox inside the sandbox?

I really don't understand what the huge deal is with this. It's almost harder to get some plain text onto the clipboard than it is to get the user to run a .exe.

It can't as long as I know. :(

A slightly better implementation would have been to have a JavaScript click event on every colour and then use a JavaScript to Flash function to do the copy to clipboard. Then only one Flash file would have had to be loaded.

AFAIK, it wouldn't work. Flash can only copy to the clipboard after an event like click, doubleclick, etc, within the swf.

He is saying that when you click on the color it sends a message to the flash object as to which color they are interested in and then the popup will be eligible to click on which will then copy to the clipboard.

Because Flash objects are positioned above every other element on the page, I'd have to guess which color is below the large, single Flash object. I tried doing this with variable levels of success, but concluded that having a Flash object for every color didn't have any huge downside. Performance seems to be acceptable, unless you're using IE. Let me know if you have any performance issues.

The page takes a couple of seconds to refresh on a 2007 Mac Mini.

Take a look here, this piece of code provides `copy("text");` in JavaScript, and uses only one SWF (I think). sites.google.com/site/yangshuai10/jquerycopyplugin

http://sites.google.com/site/yangshuai10/jquerycopyplugin (just linking)

I like the fact that many people on HN seem to be running ClickToFlash.

Gnash actually, and even then only because Firefox nagged me every time I visited a site with Flash. otherwise I'd have gone without. Luckily Gnash has ClickToFlash-like capabilities built in.

Nice tool, although the way the colors are displayed can distort perception. Always remember to test and pick colors in context. If you are using a white background, don't pick colors in a black app, and vice versa.

How is this a problem here? As I see it the app uses both white and black backgrounds to help avoid this problem.

Displaying them all in a column like that emphasizes the value variations. Which is the point, of course. It's just that there is a segment of the population that always acts shocked to discover that the three colors they picked look different put together, than they do alone.

Eric Meyer's Color Blender has been doing this for years.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend/

Thank you. Plus:

If you'd like to have the Color Blender for offline use, just view source and save

(actually, just saving the html page does it)

Too much choice I think. "0to255 is a simple tool that helps web _designers_ find variations of any color." Designers already have offline tools to explore full color spectra.

Tools that turn color theory into recommendation algorithms are much more useful. Illustrator introduced a "Color Guide" palette for this and it's great. Would be even better as a free online tool. Doesn't necessarily need to be user-contributed like Kuler.

I am sure programmers will find this tool very useful. I had to show a pie chart of different categories of data with varying weights. So I had to use the same color for representing weight of the same category. The best resource I could fine for identifying variations of same color was http://www.december.com/html/spec/colorhslhex10.html. Though it gives variations for same color, the variations aren't sequential between the rows. So at any point I couldn't get more than 10 cascading variations of the same color. This tool solves that problem pretty well.

Agreed. As a developer often working on small side projects, it's super helpful to not have to launch photoshop to mess around with colors.

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

I don't think the app is meant to be a whole color scheme design tool, so much as a helper that solves the specific question: "What is one shade lighter of this color?". "How about two shades".

Exactly. I made 0to255 to solve the "I need a slightly lighter color" problem, which is actually a really frequent one. There are already really awesome tools for color inspiration like those on http://www.colourlovers.com/

I wish "pick another color" put a second color to the right of the first instead of replacing it.

Hmm, that's a good idea. I'll play around with that.

This is well done, though I was also befuddled at first by the spinners on hover.