
Piknik - my full screen color picker - arnemart
http://color.aurlien.net/
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d4ft
I may have just discovered my latent epilepsy

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huhtenberg
Good stuff.

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 :)

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injekt
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.

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araneae
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.

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DanielStraight
Indeed.

The box should jump to the top if you hover over it before locking a color.

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AgentConundrum
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.

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mrspeaker
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.

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famfamfam
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.

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AgentConundrum
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.

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gruseom
_you need to include an alternative to scrolling (perhaps +/- ?)_

How about up/down arrows?

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AgentConundrum
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.

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bgraves
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?

<http://picnik.com>

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?

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mk
"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.

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FluidDjango
Very handy. And exquisitely executed.

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.

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smbwrs
Beautiful. If Mr. Aurlien could somehow work in CSS3 gradients too, something
like this - <http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/> \- I'd be willing to
pay for it.

I wish there was an easy way to buy web apps like I can buy iPhone apps. I'd
easily throw down a buck for Piknik + some kind of gradient generator.

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jcromartie
Very interesting... _every_ color I stop on looks good in this, because of the
transparency in the design.

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DeusExMachina
What are those three flash movies at the bottom of the page for? Just to
highlight the values on mouse over?

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nathos
for copying the values to the clipboard

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MattProspect19
Thank you! This is awesome and extremely useful. Seriously, thank you for
this.

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RoyG
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.

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Keyframe
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.

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RoyG
Ummm, sorry but that's not correct; it is Hue, Saturation and Lightness. You
are confusing luminosity with lightness:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminosity>

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Keyframe
I stand corrected then. It's not really that important anyways.

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jh3
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.

Still very cool though, good job.

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jianshen
This is fantastic, especially in full screen chrome. I'd love to hear the
inspiration behind why you decided to build this.

+1 Bonus Points for the subtle faux color gradient in 'Piknik'

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rntz
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?

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icegreentea
Think you need to use the scroll wheel on your mouse.

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rntz
ENOENT

(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.)

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fshaun
Easily "exporting" the last interesting colors via clicking is nice. A stack
of boxes showing the last N chosen colors would help eyeball themes.

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DrStalker
I like the way the title is always in a nice readable contrast and the info
box down the botom always matches the selected colour - lots of fun.

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jadedoto
On Chrome/Linux it seems that when I make the luminosity go to 0 (that is,
solid black), I lose all readability half of the text...

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antidaily
Cool. I found myself wanting to know the hex values of the bottom box (on and
off state) as well - an instant palette.

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Keyframe
Great, I'd just like to have a white, black and 50% grey reference within a
page - maybe Piknik letters up there?

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sfphotoarts
This doesn't work on the iPad :(

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LordLandon
Works on my droid 2, except I can only tap different places, as dragging
causes the browser to scroll

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biilly
It's fun. Now if I could lock in text styles it might even be useful.

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hanula
Simple and useful. I like it.

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wingo
Fun!

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jw84
Love using this with my Magic Mouse.

