sano the super geek

the endeavors of a professional geek at microsoft.

ColorPicker.NET

ColorPicker.NET screenshot

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.

Published Thursday, January 20, 2005 2:43 AM by csano

Comments

 

Stephen Hill (blog@gatekiller.co.uk) said:

I think this tool is very cool and as a web developer, it will help me quickly get colours and hex codes.

I think a dropper tool so I can pick any colour on my screen would be even more usful. So i can quickly pick a colour from a webpage or photo or whatever.

You could also look at the way The Gimp allows you to view and change your colours, they are very good.

Apart from those minor things, this is a very handy tool that I will defo be using.
January 20, 2005 3:30 AM
 

Andrei Pociu said:

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!
January 20, 2005 3:36 AM
 

OmegaSupreme said:

Very nice, it works extremely well.
January 20, 2005 4:56 AM
 

Rui Miguel said:

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.
January 20, 2005 5:27 AM
 

Khash said:

Nice piece of work. Couple of suggestions:
1. Copy from HEX edit box.
2. Editable HEX box (so one can enter the hex value of the colour and see it)
3. Minimise as tray icon
4. % sign in H edit box is broken/missing/covered up with something!
5. It would be really really nice if the tool can switch to a mode that can pick colours from anywhere in the screen. so you can pick a colour from another application, this feature alongside minimise to tray could be really useful.

Cheers,

Khash
January 20, 2005 5:32 AM
 

mschaef said:

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.
January 20, 2005 6:47 AM
 

Ken said:

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.
January 20, 2005 6:48 AM
 

Brett said:

Hi

Nice start :) nice and stable and looks good as well. Couple of things I can suggest:

1. Ability to pick up colour from anywhere on the screen (eye dropper style). This is always a really useful feature.

2. Why can't you select the Hex value? Maybe you should have some mouse or keyboard shortcuts to do stuff like this.

3. Minimize to system tray (would like to keep the app open but not take up task bar room).

4. Ability to delete an added colour.

5. CMYK maybe?

6. And just as a pipe dream :) it'd be great to have an app that also integrated the functionality of this site http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

Anyway, cheers and keep up the good work
January 20, 2005 6:57 AM
 

Scott Williams said:

I like it, and I'll probably use it the same way as you; when I don't want to open up photoshop. Just a couple of things worth noting:

- If it could save the state when I close the app, so it doesn't revert back to defaults each time I open it (I greatly prefer the 'H' mode like photoshops default).

- Some way to delete custom colors would be cool, but not all that necessary.

- Why is Hex read-only? I'll use that the most when doing web designs.

- And for the love of God, please do away with the default .Net exe Icon :)

Thanks!
January 20, 2005 7:23 AM
 

Don Alvarez said:

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
January 20, 2005 8:30 AM
 

Uwe Keim said:

Would be cool to have a color-picker CONTROL to use in my own forms. Found only one (rather lame) on the net...
January 20, 2005 8:45 AM
 

Ralph Whitbeck said:

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.
January 20, 2005 8:59 AM
 

Mike Shaffer said:

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.
January 20, 2005 10:04 AM
 

James Geurts said:

To those who want the eye dropper functionality... have a look at pixie. It's free, also:

http://www.nattyware.com/pixie.html
January 20, 2005 1:45 PM
 

David said:

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/
January 21, 2005 2:45 AM
 

Brent Holliman (aka dirtyb) said:

January 21, 2005 10:35 AM
 

Powertoys WebLog said:

January 21, 2005 1:02 PM
 

Ray Booysen said:

Well Done! This is amazing. Now where is the source? :)
January 21, 2005 10:35 AM
 

Blog de Jose Luis Manners said:

January 21, 2005 3:54 PM
 

Jose Luis Manners' Blog said:

January 21, 2005 3:58 PM
 

Jose Luis Manners' Blog said:

January 21, 2005 4:02 PM
 

Jose Luis Manners said:

Good job !!!!
January 21, 2005 1:06 PM
 

José Pascoal said:

Good
January 25, 2005 4:52 PM
 

ExplosiveDog.Com said:

January 27, 2005 12:52 PM
 

ExplosiveDog.Com said:

January 27, 2005 12:53 PM
 

TrackBack said:

Oliver Sturm's weblog » ColorPicker.NET
February 15, 2005 5:21 AM
 

Life, Universe and Everything according to Dirk said:

A cool utility I found referenced on the VS Power Toys web log: ColorPicker.NET.  It allows you...
April 18, 2005 6:18 AM
 

the rasx() context » Blog Archive » Ever More .NET Links Mostly about New Stuff in .NET 2.0 said:

PingBack from http://www.kintespace.com/rasxlog/?p=337
March 30, 2006 12:15 PM
 

ExplosiveDog.Com said:

I haven't posted much lately, mostly due to school starting again. I wanted to post a few things that

January 13, 2007 5:53 PM
New Comments to this post are disabled

This Blog

Syndication

Tags

No tags have been created or used yet.

© 2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of Use  |  Trademarks  |  Privacy Statement
Microsoft
Page view tracker