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Comment by _kush | Hacker News Reader

Hi, HN!

Really excited to share my little project here. Being a colorblind designer, it was often hard for me to figure the color names and decide which colors to use. Hence, I decided to make this app.

Cone lets you pick colors in real time using the phone's camera. It lets you build color palettes while on the run, capturing and recording color for later comment/discussion, sending the colors to someone else quickly and efficiently, and of course translating a physical objects color to a usable set of information without having to get expensive colorimetric equipment.

Really excited to hear feedback from you all :)

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I like how you kept the site and dependencies simple. 34.7KB of js (~21 is mostly color definitions), and 4.2KB of css.

Just FYI:

1. You could save ~15.75kb by minifying your JS/CSS (a bit nit-picky since your resources are a fraction of what most sites have)

2. The 1MB background image comes out to 570.6 KB through tinypng.com (47% off!). If lossless is more your thing, you could save about 5% by running it through something like imageoptim.

If you're willing to go lossy, also look at PNGQuant - https://pngquant.org/ I've started using it on all of my web images. I've yet to see the loss on a couple dozen images, but the size drops by up to 66%, even after being run through imageoptim.

Webp is much better for compression, but is support does not exist.

tinypng is actually based on pngquant + more optimizations not in pngquant

30MB for the app itself seems excessive, though.

Most of that is probably due to Swift's runtime library.

Surely if you're using core Swift, or core Objective-C, the runtime is a shared lib shipped with the OS? I can't imagine that every single app built on Swift or Objective-C is bundling the exact same foundation? That seems so unlike Apple to miss such a massive optimization to reduce the download size of nearly every app. I can understand there being exceptions with some apps that use custom setups, but surely the majority of apps are written in XCode using exactly what is provided as a toolset.

I'm not an expert in the why, but as far as I am aware the whole of Swift is shipped as part of each app as it is still being developed. There is a road map to ship with the OS I believe but it's not for a while

It's because swift doesn't have ABI stability yet.

Thanks

> I can't imagine that every single app built on Swift or Objective-C is bundling the exact same foundation

In fact, every single app built on Swift is bundling the full set of runtime libraries, both on iOS and Mac. This will continue until the Swift ABI is finalised.

This is why I don't ship Swift yet.

Usually, my website projects have a couple grunt tasks running for image compressing, minimizing files, etc., but for this landing page, I just went with the basic HTML and CSS workflow. I realized how easy it was to create a website when there was no grunt or other dependencies haha.

However, I'll definitely be optimizing the files. Thank you for the tip!

Really cool - simple and effective. Love that it starts right away when openened. (And cool landing page too)

Being color blind too (well, anomalous trichromat) I sometimes take pictures of things I want to buy/examine and analyze the colors at home: could you make a Force Touch option to load a picture from the camera roll instead of using the camera? (I suggest force touch because I don't want to interfere with the current simple interface/starting right away)

Either way, thanks, this will be used a lot

This feature is definitely on the roadmap. Force touch is a good idea but it makes discoverability of the feature difficult. I will find a way to make it more obvious and keep the interface simple.

Thank you!

This looks nice (and has many knowledgable people say so) and simple, so I don't want to come off as too much of a critic.

But, can I just say that I think the use of "real time" for an interactive color picker is a bit over the top?

I mean, what would the opposite be? You click a color, then one hour later you get an e-mail? Color picking in one shape or another has been done for 30+ years[1], and it has always been real-time, it's a basic interactive tool when working with computer images.

I realize it maps the color from a camera-fed image to a human-readable name (which perhaps wasn't always done in the past), but that's still not an operation I'd expect to have to wait for, not even when running on a mobile phone.

In short, I think those two words should be removed.

[1] This number is only slightly out of thin air; I picked colors on my Amiga in the late 80s.

Really beautifully designed app!

As a fellow colourblind person, I've looked for similar "name the colours" apps before as I struggle to identify some colours (more out of curiosity than any real need, as I'm not a designer) but didn't find anything as nice as this!

Looks awesome for creating palettes too. Thanks for posting!

Had a similar idea to help with my color deficiency, but never developed it. Would totally use this if it were on Android.

Seconded.

Being severely chromatically challenged myself, I instantly fell in love with this app - a much better execution than the apps I've tried in the past.

I'd upvote you twice if I could.

I did not try the app, but the landing page is just great. Kudos.

Awesome. Great idea, even better execution. Would you be interested in an Android developer for developing an Android version?

Thank you! Currently, I don't have the resources to hire an Android developer but I'll definitely do it once I complete the feature set in iOS. Please send me an email so that I can contact you back when I need you.

Very cool. Did you come up with these "color names" yourself?

From the footer:

> The Resene RGB Values List is copyrighted to Resene Paints Ltd, 2001. Name That Color by Chirag Mehta

Why is that copyrighted? Now that work is a literary work and no one can use the code till Disney gets permanence on their copyrights.

There are so many better licenses.

Private, old company. Its their nature unfortunately.

Really keen to try this, congratulations on launching. I've been missing something like this since Adobe bought and slowly crippled Kuler.

I'm color bind too. I'm actually jealous I didn't think of this. I have been working in Krita lately, and I'm guessing on colors. Krita will give hexadecimal # of a particuliar color, but not a worded description of the color.

This has so many potential uses--fashion websites for one. I can't go by the color on websites for the clothing; I need to look at the details for the written color. I usually just buy black, and people call me Jonny Cash. A therapist once asked me why I always wear black. Just too dissalusioned on so many levels to tell why. That was my last session.

I imagine sites like The Gap would pay for a custom app incorporated into their site?

Will I pay for this app? Maybe? It will be my first bought app. All these years, and I never gave Apple my CC, on principle. They might get it today though.

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