Reinventing the (Color) Wheel
Written on June 24, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
Some things have been remade frequently because they are fill a useful niche, and someone thinks they can either do them better, or because they want to see them in a new form, or perhaps they perceive a potential money-maker. This seems to be the case with color wheel applications. A quick Google search turned up a page with over twenty of them, mostly for the Windows desktop, and I am certain there are hundreds more to be found with more extensive digging. Even on the still relatively new iPhone platform there are at least six strong contenders.
The ones I found (all prices are in US$) are:
- Color Expert $9.99 by Code Line Communications
- Palettes $9.99 (also has free Lite version) by Rick Maddy
- cliqcliq Colors $2.99 by cliqcliq
- colorSutra $1.99 by Alex Rybkin
- Color Set $2.99 by Corellis
Here’s a few screenshots from the two apps I bought. First, colorSutra:
I generated the “Peachy keen” color using the color wheel, by dragging my finger across the display then adjusting a couple of slidebars to manipulate the tint (amount of black or white added to the pure color) and saturation. I clicked the “Display” icon on the bottom of the screen, which showed it along with coordinating colors. Finally, after saving the color, and giving it a name, I was able to see the hexadecimal value, which is useful for web site design since that is how colors are defined in HTML.
Another way to find colors with colorSutra that I really liked is illustrated here. By selecting the “Camera” button, you are presented the choice of taking a new snapshot with the iPhone’s camera, or selecting a picture already in your Camera Roll. Once an image is imported, you can tap or drag your finger around on the image to choose an individual color, as I’ve done here. Then you save it and display the definition, as above. It is a useful little app for finding exactly the right shade you want.
Then, from Palettes:
Palettes is quite a bit more sophisticated, as one would hope for an app that costs five times as much as colorSutra. This app also has a tool for extracting colors from a camera snapshot, although it does that automatically rather than letting you scrub around the image yourself. What is particularly good about Palettes is the large range of colors you can store in each palette, or collection of related colors — up to 25 — and the way you can extract additional palettes from any color in the set. There is even a function for creating blends from any two colors in the set, with choices of 1, 2 or 3 blended colors along a spectrum from one original to the other. On another menu, you can drag one of the colors from your palette into a “well” at the bottom of the screen, and the app generates another palette of colors, from five to fifteen, based on your choice of controls, selected by tapping little wheel icons. If you want to create not just a color, but a whole color scheme, Palettes is an app you will really appreciate.
So, why do I care? Well, as a website developer, I sometimes struggle to find just the right shade or combination of colors for a page design, and as a jewelry designer I also look for new combinations to generate ideas for new items. Actually, there are dozens and dozens of reasons to use apps like these, but having them on the iPhone makes them particularly useful for crafters and decorators, since having a color scheme with you when you go shopping can be very handy. But there is another reason to use them on the iPhone, and that is the touch screen. Both of these apps I’ve reviewed here use touch gestures to perform actions quickly and easily. This makes them intuitive and fun to use, as well as producing quick results. I will be using both these apps for some time, I’m sure.
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