Matt's script provides what users can quickly recognize and use as a color picker. The color layout may be debatable, but it has enough colors to be useful, and eqally important not as many as to be useless. It doesn't have any technical or conceptual hurdles.

Not accidentally, I can't see the example you link because I don't have the java plugin installed. Java is a total no-no for me, but if we can find something nicer done in JavaScript, that's would be totally ok with me.

that java is a no-no.

however, a color picker with more colors won't get useless (maybe you had the occasion to look at a color picker in photoshop or the like).

the web-safe-color era definitely is over, imho.

maybe we should provide color schemes, too? (or maybe that's a point when we talk about themes the next time.)

but we should get something easy to operate, i.e. no rotating cubes and stuff ;-)

You're right, I haven't looked at a Photoshop palette (or at Photoshop at all) for something like 5 years.

colorp3kker (text/html, 104 KB)

please let me know how you like it.

features like pasting the color into the right antville form feed can be added easily.

this is very very cool.

Did you do this from scratch? In which case I'm even more blown away, but I'm also blown away if you stole borrowed it somewhere ;-)

The only thing I don't find very easy to use is the brighness selector on the right. Maybe use 10 distict solid squares going from black to white instead of a gradient? And/or some helping text?

Something I just noticed: black and white are not very easy to select.

www.visibone.com

what i like about this one is that you can pick a couple of colours and see how they look together. (which actually reminds me of changing the colour scheme of our site. the worldcup is over ;-)

i did it from scratch using helma's fantastic javascript-to-java capabilities (which gave to me functions like getHSBColor)...

yes, the brightness adjustment needs to be improved. actually, i would like to see this done on the client-side but i still have to check browser issues.

how about extra black and white squares somewhere?

how about extra black and white squares somewhere?

very good idea, methinks.

ah, the black and white scale is to select the brightness. yep, cool, but very slow on my ibook 500 with ie.

I did a slight variation on colorp3kker that does brightness control on the client side (not really implemented though).

colorpicker (text/html, 84 KB)

I got something wrong with the gifs or spans though, but I think you get the idea.

document.forms.0.elements.0 is not an object

anyway, i suppose a table with all websafe colours in a nice and intuitive layout would be better for person close to you. well, i don't know anything about her computer skills, but when i was new to computers i couldn't deal with all the different colour spaces, colour models and colour pickers. even now i still prefer these crayons as colour picker on the mac when i need a colour quickly.

so far Matt Kruse's script is still king in ease of use by quite a bit. But let's see how far we can improve this. Maybe we come up with something that works.

i still prefer the visibone thingie. it's much easier to find neighboured or opposite or similar colours. but i don't think you can nick it.

but we can do something similar, too:

hannes, as far as i understand your modifications, the trick would be to get variations of brightness by rolling over the right bar? i think that's a cool turn and will try to implement the appropriate rollovers.

also, the additional b&w boxes will come.

kris, we certainly can provide a good selection of colors like those crayon ones on mac os. and we also could give to you the option to combine different colors for preview.

but as usual, i fear the trend of people jumping on the feature request bandwagon just because one person started to actually do something at all ("under the christmas tree"). so maybe some might want to stick to the visibone color chooser, anyway.

confusing, to put it nicely. I never know where to look for a close color.

Tobi, after playing around a bit, I came to the personal conviction that it would be best to have the brightness-scale as static areas going from black to white, and clicking on those would switch the palette (like you did, instead of the other way round like I semi-implemented it). But maybe as an improvement we could switch palettes locally in the browser?

i think that your approach is much more elegant due to the simple fact that it only needs to modify 10 colors instead of 18*18...

what i will do today is try out both ways and see which one feels better. switching the palettes locally in the browser is a must, anyway.

Yes, but the problem I see is that you don't see the color you're actually choosing on the palette (unless you happen to want the color in its default brightness).

that's right in the current online version of the chooser. on my machine i already see something like this:

the miracles of modern html animated gifs...

here we go: the next version of the colorp3kker (text/html, 104 KB)

tobi, one cannot choose colors with a high brightness and low saturation, in other words one can only define 50% of all available colors with this js. (e.g. a light green, a light pink,...). Any way to change this?

we're definitely getting somewhere here!

Here's what I perceive as usability problems:

• brightness and color selection should work both directions, i.e. it should be possible to select a brighness, then, optimally, the palette would change to that brighness, and you should then be able to pick a color from the palette. Selecting a color from the palette should not deselect the brightness level, infact, I think the brighness level currently visible in the palette should always be selected (which would mean that the window would start with a brightness level selected).
• The background of the page (or whatever we take as preview area) should only change when clicked. I think we then need an extra button to "OK" the selection.
• I think it would be a good idea to label the two interface elements in some way, e.g "(1) choose brighness" and "(2) select color".
• The area for "white" is not very recognizable as such.

very nice!

colorp3kkerbright (text/html, 115 KB)

(are darker colors missing now?)

actually, this little color picker is already more than 100 KB in size (i think it can undergo some slimfast diet, however, it won't get tiny again).

i'd like to leave out the reverse direction of brightness controlling the palette at the moment.

to leave the brightness marquee active when another color in the palette is selected sounds ok. will do that. no wait, there's a problem: if i click on a palette color, don't i expect to get its color value? won't it be confusing to have two marquees at that moment, because i do not know which color value is displayed?

the background color change was thought of as a preview and feedback function. i'd like to keep it. or even better: simply change the corresponding color in the antville weblog...!?

the area for white will get some border or the like.

labels for the two areas...? uhm, i'll think about it.

wow, shouldnt we steal something from the 5K contest instead? ;)

is more or less what I meant.

hnscolorpicker (text/html, 93 KB)

(note: it's just a quick hack to demonstrate my ideas. The main problem I myself have with it is that the color squares are so tiny and they bleed into each other, colorwise.)

cool, think i'll adapt your code as far as it concerns the interaction between brightness and palette colors.

you removed the background preview and now i find it quite labourious to click two times and get a better feeling of the colour selection (and if the colour squares are too tiny and bleed into each other for you, you made it even harder for you yourself, imho).

however, i will create a version with bigger squares now (15x15)

now only 42 KB! colorp3kker04 (text/html, 41 KB)

this is the ultimate color picker for me! congratulations. still, I'm not the average user and it would be interesting to hear about other people's experiences.

thanks for your support and contribution. i think this could become even a cooler tooler but for the moment i'd like to stop working on it (i am already losing myself in being picky with a color picker, and there's a lot of other important stuff to be done right now...)