You know how you come across those little utilites that do one thing and do it well? These little gems that you find you can’t live without? Well, there was an app called Colors that was a must have for me and I’m thrilled to learn that it has a successor! happy dance
Colors was a color picker for Mac OS that was designed by Matt Patenaude. What made it unqique was that it lived outside of any graphics utility. It was a standalone app that allowed you to capture colors from anything you saw on the screen. Anyone who uses Photoshop, or Pixelmator is probably familar with the concept, but being able to grab a color from a web page, e-mail, etc., reduces a great deal of friction in your workflow.
A few years ago Matt took a job at Apple and after Yosemite was released, the application no longer worked. It was a sad day indeed. Every so often I do a search to find a replacement and never found anything suitable. This search was a result of being frustrated at the extra friction of having to capture a screenshot and throw it into Pixelmator just so I can grab the hex for a specific color. Finding no replacement just put salt in the wound.
Until today.
On a lark, I did another search using Matt’s name and “colors” and found his GitHub repository with a note
Important note: Colors is no longer actively maintained, and does not work properly on OS X Yosemite and later (10.10+). However, former {13bold} partner-in-crime Laurent Baumann picked up where I left off with the slightly-more-French Couleurs, which looks and works great on Yosemite!
Couleurs is an updated version of colors and it looks and it fills the hole in my heart left by the demise of Colors! Laurent Baumann is the fantastic graphic designer behind BowTie and other things and the refresh he did to the Colors app is elegant, minimalistic and a delight to use. I instantly downloaded and installed the app. Launching it and then grabbing a few quick colors from around my desktop I couldn’t wait to blog about it.
Given that I only post about once-a-year should be a good yardstick on just how happy I am right now. Thank you Laurent!!!