Show HN: Color Picker Pro, Open Source Color Picker for Mac Os X | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Color Picker Pro, Open Source Color Picker for Mac Os X

github.com

55 pointsoscardelben35 comments

For the life of me I can't understand why Apple decided to remove hex values from their color picker with Lion. This is a great alternative, the copy shortcut is very handy.

They didn't, because, AFAIK it wasn't there in the first place. You probably had some plugin installed -- http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/ or http://www.panic.com/~wade/picker/. Also, some programs, like Acorn, loads their own hex color picker plugin inside the app.

The "DigitalColor Meter" program with the developer tools actually used to include hex values. I actually hadn't noticed the hex values are gone, so thanks lancashire for making me notice. I may need this app now.

Hi guys, I'm the author of that app. You can choose which format you want to save by default (hex or rgb) as well as hiding the color preview in the menubar through the app preferences. Please let me know if you feel like something is missing.

You have a great resumé and what looks to be a vert bright future ahead of you. Good luck and thanks for the app!

You are a gentleman and a scholar - I have shared it with my office and I have made my developers happy.

Bless you, good sir.

I only have a couple criticisms. One is that I wish the shortcut for copying to the clipboard were easier. cmd shift p takes two hands, so I have to take my hand off the mouse to copy the color.

The other is that the zoomed in preview probably shouldn't be antialiased as it makes it harder to see the individual pixels.

Other wise this is a really nice app, good work!

A screenshot on the homepage (not just the github page) would be great.

Nice icon by the way.

Thanks, I hired a designer for that

I might be an outlier, but, I spent a few hours last weekend looking for a color picker that had CMYK support.

Although, maybe I'll send a pull request your way, if I find the time to add it in.. should just be a matter of colorUsingColorSpace: and {cyan, magenta, yellow, black}Components of NSColor and a quick addition to your NSColorFormatter.

(// edit: other than that, this looks pretty awesome.)

CMYK (and others) added, look for an update soon.

Indeed! I'm the one that made the pull request adding support for copying the color as CMYK ;)

Which license is this released under? I don't see any indication of anything other than this in the auto-generated XCode comments:

     //  Copyright 2011 DibiStore. All rights reserved.

What is the preferred way to report bugs?

I've just stumbled upon two:

1. when mouse cursor approaches top edge of the screen, preview stretches vertically so that it's still square, but pixels are twice as tall as they are thick. That's on an mbp5,5 running 10.7.1.

2. Cmd+Shift+p uses physical location of p key disregarding programmatically set keyboard layout. I've only noticed because I'm using Colemak.

Good work!

What is the preferred way to report bugs?

I've just stumbled upon two:

1. when mouse cursor approaches top edge of the screen, preview stretches vertically so that it's still square, but pixels are twice as tall as they are thick. That's on an mbp5,5 running 10.7.1.

2. Cmd+Shift+p uses physical location of p key disregarding programmatically set keyboard layout. I've only noticed because I'm using Colemak.

Hi, I'm working on both of them! If you find anything else, feel free to use Github issues

There seems to be some strange behaviour with dual monitors.

I have a 27" iMac (2560x1440) and I have an external monitor hooked up (1920x1200) and positioned to the right of the main desktop.

When I move the cursor around on the second monitor, the picker preview window stops tracking and updating when I move close to the top edge (maybe 100 pixels?) or the right (farthest) edge (at least 300 pixels there) of the monitor.

edit: I'm running Snow Leopard 10.6.8

Yeah, this isn't showing the preview of the second monitor (Lion), but it still captures the color. This is a GREAT app!

Because it is open source, I can pick it apart and learn how to do certain programming things.

Thanks author

There seems to be an issue with detecting the second monitor on certain cases. I'm looking into it but didn't find a solution yet.

Thanks - I've been wanting something like this. One feedback idea would be to let me close the stay-on-top window with the keyboard instead of having to clicking the x or the eyedrop icon. It'd be great if hitting escape closed that window... so the workflow would be command-shift-p, get the color I want, then close the window with escape. Thanks for the app -

I'll do somethng about that. Thanks.

I've just been using cmd + h to hide the app once i've copied the color. Esc would be nicer, but hide works ok for now without having to use the mouse

Great app. I only wish there was an option to exclude the # when copying, as then I could directly paste the color code into Photoshop.

I'll add an option for that. Thanks for the feedback.

Just saw the update - awesome! Thank you.

While I love this is FOSS, there's is a $1 paid-app that is almost entirely 1:1 with the Snow Leopard (plus features) called "Classic Color Picker". Totally worth it IMO.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/classic-color-meter/id4516400...

So glad for this. I used to use Pipette on a regular basis, but it seems to be half-broken in Lion. This saves my day(s).

Would be nice to have a copy-this-color mode that didn't include the #, as Photoshop doesn't like hex colors longer than 6 characters, but that's more of a nit than a real complaint.

This is nice! I've been looking for a decent, lightweight colour picker since switching from Windows years ago, where I relied on the also excellent Pixie (http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.php)

Here's another one: http://instant-eyedropper.com/

Quality program. Well worth the download and even a donation. I just opened kuler to poke around with it; I can definitely see this being a huge time saver on projects.

Any chance you will extend the clipboard capability so I can copy 4-5 colors at once?

Edit: To elaborate, I mean, have colors saved in some sort of list box or something so I can click them to get to my clipboard or something of that nature.

Can you elaborate on that? If you could open a Github issue describing the functionality I'll do my best to make it in the next version.

You could use Jumpcut: http://jumpcut.sourceforge.net/

Naming Product X Pro is the de facto for a version that requires payment...

You're right, I chose that because colorpicker was already taken as a bundle name (if/when I'll submit to the AppStore).

Thank you! I can't even count the number of times when I needed something like this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com