Piknik - my full screen color picker

I may have just discovered my latent epilepsy

Good stuff.

For v2 please consider adding non-uniform H scale. With some hues the difference in one point is much more noticeable than in others (e.g. 140-160 range vs greens or violets).

Also, could really use more precise navigation. E.g. if I am at the right hue and want to adjust saturation, I would ideally do something that wouldn't change hue when I wiggle my mouse. Perhaps account for a Ctrl key being held down, or make left click fix the hue first, and the saturation next... ?

Good stuff nonetheless. The logo is pretty awful though :)

It's nice. I like that it's a full screen perspective as opposed to the usual 10x10 box which makes it truly impossible to show how a color may look on a larger scale.

In reply to the numerous comments regarding the lack of features; I think that's a feature in itself. If I'm looking for a boat full of features I'll open up an image manipulation program.

Open up a browser, throw the mouse pointer around until I see something I like, click, done. Simple. I like it.

Only one major problem I see; you can't "hold" any colors that are under the hex or rgb values, because if you click there it copies the values instead. But of course that's a trade off, because that's a cool feature to have.

That's nifty! One thing I find annoying about colour pickers is that they show a TINY preview in a small rectangle. When you fill a big chunk of screen real estate (like for a background) it looks totally different (to my crappy design eye).

This picker might not be practical for everyday kind of professional use - but it's a great alternative for trying to pick a new colour when you don't know exactly what you're looking for.

Its simple, but it works well, especially to pick main theme colours, mrspeaker rightly points out that doing so in a tiny preview window rarely gives you a proper indication. I'm not entirely sure that it actually fits into a designer or css workflow, but it _is_ enjoyable. Plus it appears to be HTML5, so it has electrolytes.

A few thoughts (without necessarily providing any solutions!):

* While interesting that the logo changes colour, I find that it nearly always picks a gradient which is extremely uncomplimentary to the background. It would be less of a distraction if it was only white/black.

* When you click to lock the colour, it would be nice if it could leave a marker to show you where your choice was, so that you could make minor adjustments more easily (I guess the luminosity makes it a little tricky!).

* The links for the colours at the bottom of the app say rgb(239,16,146), which would be great for CSS to copy-paste the correct format, but when you click it actually enters '239 16 146'. The hex code is the only one which gives me a useful value straight into the clipboard.

* I missed the note about luminosity at first (I count myself as a typical user in that I do not read instructions), it makes sense and works quite well when you actually start scrolling, but is a little hidden.

One thing that became immediately apparent to me is that you need to include an alternative to scrolling (perhaps +/- ?).

The reason, of course, is that not everyone has the ability to scroll. Personally, I use a laptop as my primary machine and only have the touchpad as my pointing device. There is a way to scroll with the touchpad, but it's incredibly painful to use, and is very hit or miss on my machine. Also, I don't know how common they are today since I haven't bought one in years, but I'm sure there are users that are still using old mice without scrollers.

That said, very nice site. I can see it being very useful to me in the near future.

You are aware of that other similar sounding website (Picnik), right? You know, the immensely popular online photo editor that was acquired by Google several months ago?

http://picnik.com

As far as your actual tool: There are many color pickers available online that have many more useful features than you do. I'm not trying to be snarky and I hope you posted here for feedback.

Why would I use your product? What's the use case? What value does it provide that the other dozen or so top color pickers DON'T offer?

Very handy. And exquisitely executed.

Also, perhaps you've tweaked it since some of the other comments, but two-finder scrolling (MBP trackpad, Safari 5.0.2) works great for me. Took me a while to figure that I needed to shrink window enough to see scroll bars (and thus be able to scroll and manipulate luminosity.

I've got it bookmarked, so if you are generous enough to keep it at aurlien.net I'll definitely make a lot of use of it. Great work && great service.

Beautiful. If Mr. Aurlien could somehow work in CSS3 gradients too, something like this - http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ - I'd be willing to pay for it.

I wish there was an easy way to buy web apps like I can buy iPhone apps. I'd easily throw down a buck for Piknik + some kind of gradient generator.

Very interesting... every color I stop on looks good in this, because of the transparency in the design.

What are those three flash movies at the bottom of the page for? Just to highlight the values on mouse over?

Thank you! This is awesome and extremely useful. Seriously, thank you for this.

Interesting, but there are some issues: I couldn't get to black or white..? Also, you are mistaking luminosity for brightness: luminosity is a device factor, brightness is a color factor.

Without reading the entire bottom bar on the site, I was kind of assuming one of the color codes would be copied to my clipboard once I clicked on the screen to lock it.

Still very cool though, good job.

This is fantastic, especially in full screen chrome. I'd love to hear the inspiration behind why you decided to build this.

+1 Bonus Points for the subtle faux color gradient in 'Piknik'

I'm not able to scroll. No scroll bar appears, page-down and page-up don't work. chromium-7.0.517.41 on linux. Anyone else have this problem? Am I missing something?

Easily "exporting" the last interesting colors via clicking is nice. A stack of boxes showing the last N chosen colors would help eyeball themes.

I like the way the title is always in a nice readable contrast and the info box down the botom always matches the selected colour - lots of fun.

On Chrome/Linux it seems that when I make the luminosity go to 0 (that is, solid black), I lose all readability half of the text...

Cool. I found myself wanting to know the hex values of the bottom box (on and off state) as well - an instant palette.

Great, I'd just like to have a white, black and 50% grey reference within a page - maybe Piknik letters up there?

This doesn't work on the iPad :(

It's fun. Now if I could lock in text styles it might even be useful.

Simple and useful. I like it.

Fun!

Love using this with my Magic Mouse.