ColorPicker.NET
I do quite a bit of UI design work during my spare time and often find myself with the need to sample colors for my designs. Using Adobe Photoshop isn't effective for three reasons: (1) It takes a long time to load up, (2) It consumes resources, especially on a 512MB Tablet PC with everything that I normally run (i.e. Outlook, Visual Studio, etc), and (3) It's a pain in the butt to open and close the application every time I need to sample a color. I wanted something that was lightweight and could be fired up easily from the desktop or system tray. I was also looking for an excuse to delve into the functionality exposed by the classes in the System.Drawing namespace. Thus, ColorPicker.NET (okay, maybe that's a lame name) was born.
I'm really interested in getting feedback on the application, so I've decided to release the binaries. This is what I'd call an alpha release (a little better than prototype quality). The application is pretty stable, but there are some glitches that I need to iron out and features that I'd like to add. If there is any functionality that you think should be added, please let me know. If you think this is something that you can leverage for an application that you're working on, feel free to let me know how you think you'd be able to use it. I will be releasing the source code as soon as I clean it up and make sure that it's thoroughly commented for those of you who are interested in seeing how certain components were constructed.
Comments
- Anonymous
January 19, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 19, 2005
True, this is a useful application, and I like the drag-n-drop function.
I found a few glitches (you might already know about them):
I was planning to drag and drop but in the process a window popped up and now the color rectangle is not under the control of the cursor anymore, and it's just sitting there, always on top. Closes when I close the application, of course.
You can cause this problem by dragging and then instead of dropping use Alt+Tab to switch to another window.
When I move the circle to choose a color, the slide on right fades to red.
Also the transition between the other colors and red is not smooth. That happens only on the vertical slide (if I go to orange it jumps to red), but not on the rectangle, that goes smooth.
Cheers! - Anonymous
January 19, 2005
Very nice, it works extremely well. - Anonymous
January 19, 2005
Congratulations for your idea. Its quite handy.
Just one suggestion, why don't have a xml file to write each selection of colors while your using the app, so that the next you use aplication you can see older selections.
In this case you will have on your right side the selected colors that you already have by default plus the ones that you are select every time you use the app.
Perhaps you should delevop also in the ui a way to remove old selections ( if you had the xml file with color selected we could just delete an element ) .
keep up with the good work. - Anonymous
January 19, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 19, 2005
That's pretty cool.
I remember doing something similar, back in the DOS days, to experiment with 256-color mode on the VGA (in Ms BASIC, no less).
Just ouf of curiosity, how did you do the gradient panel on the left? It looks like it must be either statically rendered or slow. - Anonymous
January 19, 2005
Hi,
It looks cool but there is one problem that is making it unusable for me. I use two monitors and I run things like my color picker, test browser, and etc on my 2nd monitor. When I try to use your color picker as soon as I click on anything in it my mouse cursor is automatically locked in my main screen after I move it back there. I have to close the color picker and reload it. If I use the color picker in my main screen then it still locks the mouse and won't let me scroll over to my secondary screen. If you can fix this and repost the binaries then I'll give this more of a test spin over the next couple days. By the way I'm running Windows 2000 Pro and .Net 1.1 both fully patched. Ken. - Anonymous
January 19, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 19, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 20, 2005
When using color pickers with two of {H,S,B} on one widget and the third on another, I generally prefer to have Hue and Saturation grouped together.
When I interact with colors, selecting a hue and saturation that I like is generally the most fundamental activity. Tweaking the brightness generally comes later in the design process. If Hue and Brightness are on a single control, it's hard to tweak the Brightness without throwing off the Hue.
Also, as a quick question, is there a standard slider control that implements the little triangle markers like you're using for the Brightness slider? Or did you have to wire up a custom user control to do it?
-Don - Anonymous
January 20, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 20, 2005
Additional features that would be sweet!
* Ability to save a color so that you can recall it later.
* Ability to eye drop a color anywhere on the screen.
* Like Photoshop checkbox to view websafe only colors.
I like it and would use it too during development of web sites. - Anonymous
January 20, 2005
Very nice..it will replace the DHTML version that I cobbled together a few years ago. I had been meaning to do something just like this in C# and never made the time. I too don't like firing up Photoshop just to snag colors. I had a few ideas, but they've been posted. Sounds like a lot of work. Or clean up that source and open it up..... Sincerely, nice work. - Anonymous
January 20, 2005
To those who want the eye dropper functionality... have a look at pixie. It's free, also:
http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html - Anonymous
January 20, 2005
You might run into problems with that name as there appears to be a similar name already in use for a product of the same general kind.
http://colorpicker.net/ - Anonymous
January 21, 2005
Well Done! This is amazing. Now where is the source? :) - Anonymous
January 21, 2005
Good job !!!! - Anonymous
January 25, 2005
Good - Anonymous
February 14, 2005
Oliver Sturm's weblog » ColorPicker.NET - Anonymous
April 17, 2005
A cool utility I found referenced on the VS Power Toys web log: ColorPicker.NET.  It allows you... - Anonymous
March 30, 2006
PingBack from http://www.kintespace.com/rasxlog/?p=337 - Anonymous
January 13, 2007
I haven't posted much lately, mostly due to school starting again. I wanted to post a few things that