ColorPicker
Latest
Adobe’s 'Playful Palette' makes color mixing artist-friendly
Artists work with real paint by mixing groups of colors on a palette, making for natural blending and color combinations. That's a far cry from Photoshop-type color pickers, which let you grab specific colors but not combine them. Adobe Research has come up with a solution called the "Playful Palette" that gives artists the best of both worlds. It lets you create "blobs" of paint you can blend for gradients and gamuts, while allowing non-destructive edits, infinite history and other digital benefits.
Google's search engine now converts color values
There are plenty of nerdy things that Google's search engine can do, and the latest is a peach if you're a graphic designer. If you type in "RGB to Hex," you'll be shown a color converter that'll let you pick a shade and get the RBG and Hex values for both. In addition, you can hit the Show Color Values toggle and get a breakdown of the HSV, HSL and CMYK counts for those shades. Yes, it's not the most useful feature in the world, but it'll save you having to open up Photoshop just to get a color value for your web design project.
Sony thinks E Color is the new black, gives you a whole site's worth to choose from
If your gear isn't pushing the performance envelope, you typically have to resort to alternative means for attracting those precious customers. Sony's newish VAIO E series is an exponent of just such a philosophy, with its lurid colorings and replaceable keyboard skins. The company's decided to take things up a notch, however, by now offering a Color Combo site where we can combine the gnarliest hue mismatches this side of Colorware. The chromatic choices include the laptop's case and keyboard as well as the additions of a wireless mouse and a reversible sleeve. Everything that isn't bolted down to the computer will of course cost you extra, but will you really let a little bit of cash stand between you and that magenta dream machine?
Developer Color Picker: For your pickiest developer
Wade Cosgrove, code ninja over at Panic, has released a freeware Developer Color Picker that helps developers of all stripes pick and paste color declarations for a variety of languages. Any color picker will let you choose a color from anywhere on your screen, but Developer Color Picker turns that into usable code for your Xcode and web development projects. Developer Color Picker generates code suitable for NSColor, UIColor, CGColorRef, CSS and HTML declarations. Depending on what you want, you can copy just the value for the color itself, or an entire declaration including the color. Imagine the time you save not having to type UIColor *aColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:0.282 green:0.569 blue:0.894 alpha:1.000]; again! Developer Color Picker is available on Panic's website.
A color wheel for Mac OS X
I vaguely recall using a color wheel in 9th grade art class. To tell you the truth, all I remember about it is that red and green are complementary colors (hence, Christmas). I do realize, however, that many people make frequent use of this reference. If you're among them, check out Old Jewel Software's Painter's Picker. It adds an interactive color selector to almost any application via the built-in color picker. Now you've got a color wheel ready to go, which you can use to find complimentary colors, analogous colors and so on. Painter's Picker requires 10.2, 10.3 or 10.4 running on a G3, G4, G5 or Intel Mac (version 2.1 is universal). A free trial version is available, and a single license will run you $15.85US.[Via Daring Fireball]
