Colour Selector is an application for selecting, mixing and previewing colours, intended primarily for Web developers.

Strictly speaking, I have quit writing desktop software. The primary reason for revisiting Colour Selector was to rid it of the requirement to run elevated; it has been reworked for REALbasic 2006, and as such, is subject to the same caveats as SMTP Werkzeug. Mac versions are no longer available, nor are they likely to be even if I were to upgrade to Xojo, as my Mac is far too old.

For good measure, I have also switched to the XML preferences file format, added support for the CSS rgb() colour syntax (for both copy and paste), and the ability to directly rename favourite colour sets. Paste also accepts hex colours with no leading hash, enclosing whitespace, and bare RGB tuples.

Hints

Colour Selector has never been documented, and thus it may not be apparent how to use it. Here are some hints:

• Click any of the colours under Palette, any of the colours under Sets, and the output colour from Two-colour blend to copy that colour into the main Colour selector panel.
• You can drag any colour cell (including palette entries) onto any other colour cell, including (for no apparent reason) the output colour from Two-colour blend (which should be read-only). This is the quickest way to transfer colours from one part of the window to another.
• Right-click any colour cell to copy, paste or sample the colour.
• Copy colour to enables live transfer of colour from one panel to another and supports chaining: colours can cascade, e.g. Colour selector to BL (blend left), dynamically affecting Two-colour blend whose result in turn is dynamically fed to text foreground (TF).
• All colours and the sample text font, size and text are retained on exit, but transfer settings are not.
• You can maintain multiple, named colour swatches (“sets”) of ten colours each. The confusingly-named Edit → Clear favourites clears the current set (swatch); this menu item likely pre-dates the introduction of multiple named swatches.

Colour formats recognised for copy and paste:

• #RRGGBB
• RRGGBB (no leading hash, to accommodate double-click word select not including the hash)
• rgb(R, G, B)
• R G B (space-delimited)
• R, G, B (comma-delimited; paste only)

Blending problems

When developing Colour Selector, I came across a strange problem that resisted explanation: certain colour combinations (e.g. #F00–#0F0) result in a midpoint that is far too dark:

Some years later, Björn Ottosson’s article How software gets color wrong demonstrated the problem and provided some explanation for why it occurs. Colour Selector is effectively abandoned, but were it to ever be recreated in a more modern development environment, the colour blending calculations ought to move to something closer to a perceptual model.

Licence

• Colour Selector and my associated code library is licensed under the terms of the zLib license.