ColorPanel 1.0 - finally
This has been sitting in my local repository for a really long time. I don’t know why I’ve taken so long to release it. Just lack of time I guess. Anyway, it’s - another - standalone Apple ColorPicker app. Here’s the link if you don’t care about my little story, no harm done. ;) http://github.com/gauravk92/ColorPanel
These seem to be cropping up as-of-late.
I wanted to give a little bit of backstory to my decision to create my own. The first time I realized I need a standalone ColorPicker, i went, searched and didn’t find anything free. Some app had the functionality but I didn’t feel the need to pay for it. I eventually used the AppleScript route which is as easy as butter.
- that’s it.
Sadly, it’s slower and not as useful as it seems.
So I made ColorPanel, it worked out great for me but through simple usage I added features like constrain the size of the window to make it not resizeable. I like the ColorPickers default window size even if my extra plugins overlap, it looks more…right.
One day I needed to get a color from a window but everytime i would invoke the eyedropper in ColorPanel, I lost the window focus and the color got slightly grayed out. I then though of the idea to add a global hotkey to invoke the toggler so you don’t lose focus. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet, SGHotKeyLib will help, it’s a great up to date library for implementing hotkey’s but the sad fact is shortcutrecorder is pretty much obsolete. I can’t get it to work (easily at least). I plan to write my own, plus I want to work on my own HotKeyLib because while SGHotKeyLib is great, I have a few thoughts on how developers should connect to it. So that will get added.
Now all of this was done a really long time ago (maybe a year now). I then heard of Spot Color by Zach Waugh. It was a fairly barebones implementation, called the ColorPicker and that’s about it. By that time I had a couple extra features so I contacted him about just merging them into Spot Color. I never got around to it but o well.
I also recently heard of Picker by stroughensmith. I do like the concept, I might use that but haven’t had a chance to try it out yet.
In any case I hope you guys like ColorPanel, but I currently use it myself and am happy with it.
- P.S. I based the icon off of something I found a very long time ago, if you know the source, please send it to me so i can give proper credit. I haven’t been able to find it again.
Enjoy ColorPanel, source is up on github! http://github.com/gauravk92/ColorPanel
