Show HN: IRIX – color scheme editor and color tools | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: IRIX – color scheme editor and color tools

irix.app

29 pointsalbemala22 comments

I thought this was going to be a post about customizing vintage SGI desktops. Joke’s on me I suppose, for living in a different millenium.

I hope you like TEAL

I was expecting x11resources color themes, so I'm not far behind you...

edit: for those who are interested, try these

http://ciembor.github.io/4bit/

http://terminal.sexy/

https://bashcolors.com/

You may want to reconsider the name.

> IRIX is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is a variety of UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system and the universally adopted industry-standard OpenGL graphics system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX

I am pretty sure trademarks only apply to the field they are applied in. I would guess the IRIX operating system is different from this color tool.

Trademark aside, people still use and love Irix today. This is not appropriate.

Hi everyone!

I'm Alberto, the creator of IRIX.

My background is in computer engineering, but I've always been fascinated with the design of user interfaces. I tried as much as possible to mix my formal coding studies and work, with those of UI design. This led me to the creation of several apps and websites, some of which are currently published and listed on my personal website (https://albemala.me/).

While designing user interfaces, one of the areas I struggle with is color. Creating beautiful color combinations is very hard - at least for me! So I decided to create an app to help make this task easier.

Back in 2017 I started working on this project, and after a couple of months of development, I published Iris - Color Schemes Editor. I iterated on it quickly, publishing a few updates based on users' feedback. A good number of people were using it and found it useful, so I decided to move a step forward.

Last year (2019) I re-designed and re-implemented the app from scratch, improving the overall experience and set of features. A few months of work later, IRIX 2.0 was ready (https://medium.com/@albemala/irix-color-scheme-editor-color-...).

So, what is IRIX?

IRIX aims at being the definitive application for designers and artists to create beautiful color schemes. It is a full-featured color scheme editor and a collection of advanced color tools.

There are many tools around to work with colors. The web is teeming with applications to manage color schemes, test color contrast, extract colors from images, but they all have one or two features only. If you are a designer or an artist, you are probably familiar with that frustrating situation where you have three applications and five tabs open in your browser just to create a single palette!

With IRIX, the goal is to have a single space to work with colors and unify multiple tools into a single one (“A color app to rule them all”, someone could say…).

Some of the things you can do with IRIX include:

- Creating, editing, naming and organizing your color schemes. - Fine-tuning the colors in multiple color spaces and giving them names (or let the app suggest a name for you). - Generating color harmonies, shades, tints, and variations. - Mixing colors in different color spaces. - Extracting colors from images. - Testing colors for accessibility issues (contrast ratio, lightness, color blindness…). - Designing color schemes for infographics, maps, and presentations easily. - Importing colors from other applications and exporting them to many formats, like text, file, and images. - … And more!

IRIX is available on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

If you're a designer, for work or hobby, I hope you would find this app useful. I would be glad to hear your feedback and thoughts on it.

Is this an electron app? If so, could a web-app version be possible?

Also, just wanted to let you know of this css bug in landing page on iOS [screenshot]. I noticed it because I had to fix same thing last week myself!

[screenshots]

https://i.imgur.com/xAxTzVf.png https://i.imgur.com/m7p1nkd.png

Heads up: your app may turn out to be un-googleable because IRIX was a popular UNIX with sophisticated color management years ago, and modern day it's a photography supply retailer.

It might take a while to get on the 1st page of results.

Hi, you should change the name. You're using a registered trademark that looks like it's owned by patent trolls GPHI.

IRIX is a Unix OS. It's still used, still loved by people out there, just not developed or maintained. The rights however, are owned by some litigation-happy people.

> My background is in computer engineering, but I've always been fascinated with the design of user interfaces.

Forgive me if I’m being too critical, but I strongly doubt your background or enthusiasm are that extensive. The real IRIX would be well known to someone with that description.

On the opposite view, the full capitalization matches the original name, so it’s possible you’re trying to appropriate it.

Either way, change your project’s name or it’s going to be hurt by it.

That's a bit much. SGI IRIX is basically ancient history. The last release was in 2006, and SGI's heyday was the late 90's. If you were young or weren't online then, you wouldn't have a clue about it.

That is no excuse, a couple of seconds googling for IRIX would explain everything about SGI IRIX.

Apparently searching to confirm if a name is already taken is asking too much on this day and age.

I agree he should've searched for the name. But to say he simply "should've known about IRIX" because he has a computer engineering background is wrong.

There’s little point googling a 4 character mark, even the unpronounceable ones have results.

Site did not render well on Brave/iOS.

I’m in the UX/Human Factors Engineering field and hah, I too thought it was UNIX-related. Please consider changing the product name. I am guessing it is a play on iris but problematic for all reasons already outlined in comments.

Thank you all for your feedback!

Regarding the website issues - I'm working on an updated version and I'll try to address all the problems you mentioned.

As for the name - I agree with you, it's been a poor choice, I didn't do much research on it before publishing, mea culpa.

Apart from this, - Do you find the actual application useful? - Would you consider using it in your everyday work?

Was an IRIX admin in the Indigo/Octane era. Found this title deeply confusing.