It’s been almost a year since I penned down my article on the awesomeness of the OS X Colour Picker. You should read it if you haven’t already. Where was I? Colour pickers. Turns out, the OS X colour picker wasn’t always there when I needed it. Sure I could run it as an app in the dock, but that’s just clutter. It’s also not that good a swatch manager.
Another brilliant little app from Fuel Collective, Swatch lets you manage—take a wild guess—swatches right in your menubar. I like the way these guys name their apps. Figure out the core of what the application stands for, and use that as its name. I’m sure if they made an image editing application, it would be called “Image”. Back to Swatch…
Swatches is a slick colour picker, that will stand the tests of time, waiting only to serve you. Either select your colour from the scratch, or use the magnifying glass picker to get colours from anywhere on your desktop. You can make further adjustments, or just click the + button to add it to your collection. But before saving, you get to name your picker, which is really handy since a lot of these colours are hard to differentiate. When you want to use a colour in your document, select your colour and click the Hex code to copy it to clipboard.
Here’s one brilliant feature that very apparent until you dig around. When you’re creating a new swatch, it’s actually a little collection by itself. So you can drop new colours onto a swatch, building up a collection in a single colour block. Clicking the box springs out a ‘Stacks’ like few of your swatches!
I have some issues however. For one, whenever you add a colour to your palette, it gets added to the right of the previous one, creating an endless line of swatches. There’s no way to add rows to the mix. You also cannot sort your colours (a la iPhone apps). Moreover, while the Stacks view is nice to look at, it’s still not the best way to go, since you’re back to comparing similar colours based on their appearance. I think a more swatch-group structure, with the ability to rearrange your swatches would be the better way to go.
Still, Swatch is a really useful app, light in weight, and beautiful in all respects of the term. At $4, it’s a great lil’ app to have for those dealing with web colours. 14 day trial awaits.
Thanks again Milind!
