Here are a couple extensions for the OS X ColorPicker and the world’s shortest AppleScript that extend its functionality. Use ColorPicker for lots more than just turning text a different color.

HexColorPicker

The built in Mac color picker is undoubtedly useful, but it won’t tell you what color you’ve picked so you can use it elsewhere, like in a web page or image editor. A free pluginHexColorPicker from Lucky Software has you covered.

Choose a color in ColorPicker and click on the HexColorPicker icon on the top of the program (the tool tip says “Crayons”) and your color will be presented in a bar across the top of the pane. Just below you will see the color presented in Hex code, ready for your style sheet.

The name is a little misleading. HexColorPicker will also give you the RGB values for your color in either percentages or absolute values. There’s pull-down menu to choose which color description you get.

It will even tell you if your color is web safe.

Painter’s Picker

If you want more features, try Painter’s Picker, a $16 shareware program that turns the simple ColorPicker utility into a powerful design tool. From the website:

Painter’s Picker puts an interactive color wheel in almost every Mac OS X application. It adds the ability to choose related colors, such as complementary colors, analogous colors, etc. directly within the color picker. It also adds more precise controls for choosing saturation, hue angle, and brightness. Painter’s Picker is the simplest way to perform complex color selection in almost any Mac OS X application.

Painter’s Picker brings you a neat color wheel, with a number of views and will present different color palettes from which to choose complimentary colors. Choose RGB, CMYK, or HSV values and lots, lots more.

Painter’s Picker comes with its own set of online documentation. Whenever Painter’s Picker is active, simply click the button marked with a question mark.

Making ColorPicker into a program

You can call ColorPicker from most OS X programs but if you want it to be a separate application, you have to do a tiny bit of AppleScript programming.

Resiffbard offers these instruction:

First, the Color Picker/Palette of of OS X is common to most OS X document apps, for instance TextEdit. But, how do you make it available all the time?

Simple, (create) the world’s smallest useful Applescript.

Open Script Editor found in Applications/Applescript/ and write this:

choose color.

That’s all there is to it.

Save that as a script where ever you like. I saved it as Color Picker and keep it in my User Apps/ folder where I keep all my non Apple applications. I can then call it up with a quick CP using Quicksilver.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 12:05 am and is filed under Graphics, Software Review, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.