For v2 please consider adding non-uniform H scale. With some hues the difference in one point is much more noticeable than in others (e.g. 140-160 range vs greens or violets).
Also, could really use more precise navigation. E.g. if I am at the right hue and want to adjust saturation, I would ideally do something that wouldn't change hue when I wiggle my mouse. Perhaps account for a Ctrl key being held down, or make left click fix the hue first, and the saturation next... ?
Good stuff nonetheless. The logo is pretty awful though :)
It's nice. I like that it's a full screen perspective as opposed to the usual 10x10 box which makes it truly impossible to show how a color may look on a larger scale.
In reply to the numerous comments regarding the lack of features; I think that's a feature in itself. If I'm looking for a boat full of features I'll open up an image manipulation program.
Open up a browser, throw the mouse pointer around until I see something I like, click, done. Simple. I like it.
Only one major problem I see; you can't "hold" any colors that are under the hex or rgb values, because if you click there it copies the values instead. But of course that's a trade off, because that's a cool feature to have.
I don't even think it needs to jump; in fact, that might actually be a bit jarring to the user.
Instead, why not have it so that that whole area is disabled (i.e. it doesn't interfere with the click-to-hold functionality) until the user holds on a colour? You click anywhere, enabling the bubble, you do your copy, then click anywhere outside the bubble to continue.
That's nifty! One thing I find annoying about colour pickers is that they show a TINY preview in a small rectangle. When you fill a big chunk of screen real estate (like for a background) it looks totally different (to my crappy design eye).
This picker might not be practical for everyday kind of professional use - but it's a great alternative for trying to pick a new colour when you don't know exactly what you're looking for.
Its simple, but it works well, especially to pick main theme colours, mrspeaker rightly points out that doing so in a tiny preview window rarely gives you a proper indication. I'm not entirely sure that it actually fits into a designer or css workflow, but it _is_ enjoyable. Plus it appears to be HTML5, so it has electrolytes.
A few thoughts (without necessarily providing any solutions!):
* While interesting that the logo changes colour, I find that it nearly always picks a gradient which is extremely uncomplimentary to the background. It would be less of a distraction if it was only white/black.
* When you click to lock the colour, it would be nice if it could leave a marker to show you where your choice was, so that you could make minor adjustments more easily (I guess the luminosity makes it a little tricky!).
* The links for the colours at the bottom of the app say rgb(239,16,146), which would be great for CSS to copy-paste the correct format, but when you click it actually enters '239 16 146'. The hex code is the only one which gives me a useful value straight into the clipboard.
* I missed the note about luminosity at first (I count myself as a typical user in that I do not read instructions), it makes sense and works quite well when you actually start scrolling, but is a little hidden.
One thing that became immediately apparent to me is that you need to include an alternative to scrolling (perhaps +/- ?).
The reason, of course, is that not everyone has the ability to scroll. Personally, I use a laptop as my primary machine and only have the touchpad as my pointing device. There is a way to scroll with the touchpad, but it's incredibly painful to use, and is very hit or miss on my machine. Also, I don't know how common they are today since I haven't bought one in years, but I'm sure there are users that are still using old mice without scrollers.
That said, very nice site. I can see it being very useful to me in the near future.
The problem I've been having with colouring my site has less to do with finding a colour, and more to do with finding a complimentary colour. Perhaps somewhere down the line you could include the ability to create a small pocket in the middle of the screen, so that you could:
a) lock the surrounding colour, and change only the colour of the pocket as you scroll around. This helps for creating things like navigation items, where you have a background in mind, and need to create something which stands out without clashing. You could even include the ability to set the background to an uploaded picture, since some sites don't have solid-colour backgrounds.
b) lock the pocket, keep the rest of the site as-is. It could help with things like setting the background for a preselected image. Likewise, you could allow the pocket itself to contain said image.
Up/down arrows would be fine too. The +/- thing was just the first thing off the top of my head; the important thing is just providing the alternative.
You are aware of that other similar sounding website (Picnik), right? You know, the immensely popular online photo editor that was acquired by Google several months ago?
As far as your actual tool: There are many color pickers available online that have many more useful features than you do. I'm not trying to be snarky and I hope you posted here for feedback.
Why would I use your product? What's the use case? What value does it provide that the other dozen or so top color pickers DON'T offer?
"Why would I use your product? What's the use case? What value does it provide that the other dozen or so top color pickers DON'T offer?"
Maybe it's just a cool hack. Not everything has to be a fancy boxed up product with the only hope of being sold to Google. Sometimes people just like to build cool things.
Also, perhaps you've tweaked it since some of the other comments, but two-finder scrolling (MBP trackpad, Safari 5.0.2) works great for me. Took me a while to figure that I needed to shrink window enough to see scroll bars (and thus be able to scroll and manipulate luminosity.
I've got it bookmarked, so if you are generous enough to keep it at aurlien.net I'll definitely make a lot of use of it. Great work && great service.
Interesting, but there are some issues: I couldn't get to black or white..? Also, you are mistaking luminosity for brightness: luminosity is a device factor, brightness is a color factor.
HSL (Hue Saturation Luminosity) - bring your mouse all the way down to bring saturation to 0% or close and then scroll down to bring luminosity down to black or up to white.
Without reading the entire bottom bar on the site, I was kind of assuming one of the color codes would be copied to my clipboard once I clicked on the screen to lock it.
I'm not able to scroll. No scroll bar appears, page-down and page-up don't work. chromium-7.0.517.41 on linux. Anyone else have this problem? Am I missing something?
(I don't have a mouse on my laptop. I have a touchpad, and it is able to scroll by swiping or circular motions, but that didn't work on the page when I tried it.)
