Recently I worked with the awesomely smart team at Bjango to help them build a new Mac tool. Here it is, Skala Color.
Skala Color is a Mac OS X colour picker plugin. When installed, it sits right beside the built-in colour pickers that everyone is used to like the colour wheel and the crayon selector.
What stands Skala Color apart is its attention to detail. Skala Color was built for the modern Mac OS X environment, with Retina display crispness and carefully crafted animations for a smooth experience.
Skala Color was designed by Marc Edwards to cater for modern designers and developers. Colour selection can be made all within the main gradient area by dragging a circular loupe. Vertical drag selects brightness, horizontal drag selects saturation. Dragging the small handle around the loupe selects the hue.
For finer control, hue can also be selected by the slider below the main gradient area. The slider has a clever fine control mode which becomes visible when dragging the handle. Drag the handle up into the fine control area to get 4x precision hue selection.
When opacity selection is available, a second fine control slider is presented below the hue slider, allowing the same precision selection of opacity level.
Below the colour/opacity selection controls, some real smarts come into play. Alongside preset black and white buttons, a third button is shown if the system clipboard contains any recognisable colours. Skala Color is clever about parsing colours from the clipboard. Many text formats are recognisable just by copying them to the clipboard. Here are some example text formats that it will recognise and automatically convert to colours:
- #FF7A18
- rgba(255, 122, 24, 1)
- [UIColor colorWithRed:0.999 green:0.479 blue:0.095 alpha:1]
- [NSColor colorWithDeviceHue:0.071 saturation:0.905 brightness:0.999 alpha:1]
Similarly, colours can be exported to a variety of different text formats. All main colour formats that are useful to web and Cocoa developers are supported. As a developer, rather than a designer, this is a feature I use a lot.
Bjango has released Skala Color for free, to help promote their upcoming product Skala. I urge you to check it out.
Announcing EasyRes, a Mac OS X fast screen resolution switcher with live animated previews.
EasyRes is my new Mac app, a little utility I developed for myself, before polishing it up and releasing it in the Mac App Store. I found that I was switching resolutions a lot more frequently on the Retina MacBook Pro, which has more usable resolutions due to the high pixel density. Not impressed with the quality of the existing apps out there, I wrote my own.
Although a relatively simple app, which aims to do one thing right, it does include a bunch of useful features:
- Live animated previews of how windows will be sized for each screen resolution by simply mousing over the menu.
- Quick access to screen resolutions from the menu bar.
- Resolutions and previews are shown for all active screens.
- Retina smart: Resolutions are grouped by Retina and non-Retina modes.
- HDTV smart: TV resolutions such as 1080p, 1080i, 720p are all listed when available, including refresh rates such as 50Hz/60Hz, making it easy to find the right HDTV resolution.
- Recently selected resolutions are remembered for each screen.
- User-friendly labels are displayed beside resolutions, such as "Best for Retina Display", "Native", "1080p NTSC".
- Labels can be added and customised for any resolution on any screen, making it easy to find your favourite resolutions.
- Option to automatically launch at login.
You can see EasyRes in action in a YouTube video demo.
My friends at Itty Bitty Apps have released an awesome new tool for iOS developers. Reveal is a Mac OS X application for introspecting iOS apps at runtime. It allows you to visualise and modify view hierarchies in real-time. The view structure can be "exploded" in 3D, with powerful tools for drilling down and isolating the parts of the hierarchy that need attention.
I have been helping the Itty Bitty Apps team develop Reveal for the past 6 months or so. My focus has been on the 3D view hierarchy explosion visualisation, using Scene Kit & OpenGL. We are working hard on getting it all polished and looking awesome for the 1.0 release.
Reveal is currently free during the public beta phase. Take a look at http://revealapp.com/
