More Colors than a Box of Crayons

If you’ve ever had to do any amount of web design — no matter how basic — you’ve likely had to match colors for sidebar widgets or some other material. I know any time I add a new widget to the sidebar of this blog, I have to pull out a color picker.

Back in February, my best buddy from Britain, Samantha, wrote an article about a little utility named Pipette. Pipette allows you to use a eyedropper tool to sample a pixel of an image and then grab the hex code so you can easily color-match on the web.

However, I did have a gripe with Pipette — and it is a snobby spoiled Mac user gripe. It’s ugly. The pallette is boring, the icon is 128-pixels when the rest of the Mac world has long since moved to 512-pixel icons. Also, it’s annoying that the window disappears when the app isn’t selected, meaning I can’t just leave it over on the side of the screen for easy access.

But it served a great purpose. And it did its job very well.

And then I stumbled upon Colors by Matt Patenaude. Colors does everything Pipette does, but does it with some modern Mac OS X gloss. The icon is gorgeous and so is the UI.

It also has a couple more tricks than Pipette. Not only can you grab the hex code (#rrggbb) but you can also grab #rgb, rgb(x,x,x) and rgba(x,x,x,x,). Also, you may choose whether or not to include the # sign.

In my book, Colors trumps Pipette in form and function (though I only see myself using hex code). Enjoy.