palettes
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ColorSchemer Studio 2 is here, and we have licenses!
We brought you a sneak peek at ColorSchemer Studio 2 last week, and I'm excited to share the news that it's available today. Any screen-based designer should be excited, and with the new CMYK support and advanced color manipulation tools, anybody who works with color at all should have a look. Some highlights from the new release: CMYK color support Color management/profiles GalleryBrowser: browse (and grab from) over a million palettes from COLOURlovers.com, right in the app LiveSchemes, advanced color/harmony manipulation Variations palette Color Libraries Favorite Colors color groups QuickPreview now has a wide selection of layouts to work with See the sneak peek for some more coverage on new features ColorSchemer Studio 2 costs $49.99US and has a free trial available. The exciting news is that TUAW has 3 ColorSchemer Studio licenses to give away to the color lovers among our readers. Just leave a comment mentioning what new feature you think will be the most useful to you, and we'll randomly select 3 winners from the entries on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009. Here are the rules and a link to the legal statement: Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. To enter leave a comment describing which of the new features you're most excited about The comment must be left before Tuesday, December 8th, 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time. You may enter only once. Three winners will be selected in a random drawing. Prize: Full license for ColorSchemer Studio 2 Click Here for complete Official Rules. Good Luck!
First Look: cliqcliq Colors
Colors is a palette generator and editor for the iPhone and iPod touch which updated yesterday to version 1.1 with new features which make it a truly useful tool for working with those hues, tints and shades we come across every day. Colors is primarily directed at web designers and those working with RGB and Hex colors. It allows conversion between RGB, HSB and grayscale, as well as integer and floating point scales for other screen applications. As of version 1.1, Colors can handle saving multiple palettes, each containing up to 12 colors and saved with individual labels. Manipulating palettes is as easy as dragging sliders and pulling swatches into the color wells at the bottom of the screen. Palettes can be emailed to yourself (or anyone else, with multiple recipients possible) in Photoshop and Illustrator palette formats, accompanied by a bitmap image and a text file of RGB and Hex numbers for each color. Perhaps the slickest new feature in version 1.1 is the ability to work with photos, either from your iPhone or iPod touch's library, or directly from the iPhone camera. Colors automatically generates palettes based on the visible portion of the image, regenerating whenever the image is zoomed or panned. I found that Colors did a great job of pulling the essential tones from the image, although the palettes tend to default to somewhat subdued colors even when the source image is saturated and vibrant. That's easily fixed with a little post-processing on the palette, using the saturation and brightness sliders in the HSB tab of the editor. Colors 1.1 is available at the App Store for $2.99USD. If you're in the business of colors, at least those in the RGB gamut, it's worth checking out.
New Wakfu screenshots display more UI palettes
We're looking forward to Wakfu, the new 'tactical' MMORPG from Ankama, the makers of Dofus. Exactly how Wakfu will differ from Dofus in gameplay isn't entirely clear just yet, but visually, it's got a gorgeous look, much higher-res than its predecessor. Video of gameplay shows small but noticeable improvements, like grasses swaying in the wind, and water levels advancing and receding.The latest batch of screenshots on gamershell.com show more user interface elements, including the customary inventory screen, armor and weapons window (with player character included, something new), and others. If you can read (and understand) French, maybe you can puzzle out what's going on in the others. Still no release date for the beta, so let these beautiful shots appease your hunger for now.
Mac DevCenter: palettes or sidebars?
Following a dilemma that Gus Mueller faced when designing the UI for his latest release of VoodooPad 3, Mac DevCenter has posted a request for feedback on this most heated of UI topics: palettes or sidebars? Preferences can easily sway in either direction, and I personally miss the old-school functionality of Mail's pre-Tiger drawer (yay for column widths that don't have to be constantly re-adjusted), though I will concede that the drawer look is old and ugly by today's slick UI standards of palettes and sidebars.But what do you TUAW readers think? Do you prefer palettes, like in Photoshop, OmniOutliner, iWeb and Pages, or do you prefer the sidebar UI of Tiger's Mail, ecto and NetNewsWire's subscriptions panel (though it's interesting to note that NNW also uses a drawer for its site catalog)? Sound off.
TUAW Tip: make friends with Mac OS X's Font and Color palettes
One of the things I'm sure we all love about Mac OS X is how integrated so many of the apps and services are with each other, but did you know that integration can stem all the way down to the fonts and colors you use amongst your apps? In almost any input-based, Cocoa-written app you're running (Firefox, for example, is not written in Cocoa), you can press cmd + t to open a simple, unassuming fonts palette that you've probably seen at one time or another. But if you chose a particular font and size that you like in one program, you can click on the gear in the bottom left of that panel and chose 'Add to Favorites' which places it in a category aptly named Favorites on the left side of that panel. The beauty of this is that any other program that has access to that system-wide fonts palette can also make use of the fonts you mark as favorites. For bonus points, click and drag the dot at the top of that panel to reveal a preview area (pictured) where you can see what your font is going to look like before running with it. Next up is the Color palette, accessible with the cmd + shift + c shortcut. This palette employs the same basic concept: you can use it to find a color you like, and then drag a swatch of that color to the white squares at the bottom of the panel to save a version and share it amongst your other Cocoa-based apps. These little built-in tools can be really handy when working across many apps in Mac OS X. You can set a favorite font in Yojimbo (or your choice of other junk drawer apps), and then use it when chatting with a friend in Adium or iChat. Use a favorite color for highlighting in OmniOutliner? Why not save it for the next Mail message you have to send, or those Final Cut Pro and Motion projects coming down the pipeline?By no means are these a revolution feature of Mac OS X that'll rake in the switchers, but they might just make your daily activities go a little bit smoother.
WouldjaDraw illustration software
Dave Caolo showed you an open source image editing tool, so I thought I'd pick up another end of the spectrum with an illustration tool by the name of WouldjaDraw. While it isn't open source, WouldjaDraw does have a healthy array of illustrating features and tools. Inspector palettes, gradient tools, a nice selection of export formats and a strong toolset should make WouldjaDraw a satisfying alternative to the illustration mega-suites.A demo is available, and a license will run you a mere $29.95.[via Daring Fireball]
