August 26th, 2008

Choosing Hex Colors in Mac OS X

 

How to choose colors in Mac OS X is not so obvious for the first time. Fortunately we have a built-in Color Picker application in Mac OS X, but it’s rather difficult to locate and run every time I need to choose a color. So I developed I method for simplifying color picking.

What you need:

1. Quicksilver (Shame on you if you don’t know this app.)

2. Apple Script (built-in)

3. Mac OS X Color Picker (built-in)

4. Waffle Software’s Hexpicker (love the company’s name)

Step 1:

First let’s install Hexpicker. This is a Color Picker plug-in which let’s you choose Hex colors, needed for web development. So download, unpack and put the HexColorPicker.colorPicker file into <username>/Library/ColorPickers folder.

Step 2:

Install Quicksilver if it’s not already installed…

Step 3:

Open AppleScript Editor (/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor) and write this command: choose color

If you hit run it will bring up the built-in Mac OS X Color Picker.

Step 3 - AppleScript Editor

Step 3 - AppleScript Editor

Save this script: Choose File -> Save As…

Make sure you choose either application (for PPC Mac) or application bundle (for Intel based Mac) from the file format drop down.

AppleScript File Format

AppleScript File Format

Okay. Now if you double click on that file the color picker should open. Now to open this file globally I found the easiest way is to assign a trigger in Quicksilver.

Step 4:

Open Quicksilver Preferences and choose the Triggers Tab. Click the little + button on the bottom of the window to add a new trigger and select hotkey from the drop down.

Step 5:

Select the saved Apple Script file from the Select an item pane and choose Open from the Actions pane. Save it.

Step 6:

You see the created trigger in the list. Double-click on this entry’s Trigger column to open an additional window to select the hotkey for it. I choosen the Command-P hotkey…

Now every time you press Command – P (or whatever hotkey you selected) it will run the color picker. One final note. You can find the Hex colors on the last tab of the color picker.

HexPicker

Enjoy.

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