However, seek and ye shall find, and in that spirit, I've found some great, great finds for color scheme management on the mac platform. And so far, most problems I've had on the mac are easily enough solved if I'm willing to spend a little cash.
So I'd been a bit bummed out about losing two of my favorite color scheme programs: Tiger Colorimpact (my tool of choice) and Colorschemer, my second choice. Color Schemer is available for mac, but doesn't export the palettes to a format that the native mac colorpicker can use, so in programs using the standard mac colorpicker, it takes many extra steps to used these predetermined schemes. Okay, maybe not so many extra steps, but a LOT of extra clicks. And for someone who uses their hands and arms for a living, every keystroke counts!
Additionally, I was confounded by how basic the mac color picker was. It's been so long since I've actually had to deal with that horrible Windows native color picker, that I forgot how deficient the native tools given to us by Apple and Microsoft are.
So in my quest, I found some really, hidden gems that not many people seem to know about. I am the queen of "pimping my mac," so I found these two things that caught my eye:
Shades and
Painter's Picker.
Of the two, Painter's Picker is more heavy duty. It's a color scheme program in it's full glory: complementary, split-complementary schemes on the fly.
Shades is a little more monotone (get the pun?) in it's usage. It just gives you varied shades on the selected color. You can make a few alterations, but it's nowhere as full-featured as Painter's Picker, although the GUI look is much prettier.
The beauty of both of these alternate color pickers is that they show up in all cocoa apps like ilife, iwork, Photoshop (after you toggle a setting to use the apple picker and not photoshop's native picker). Any app that displays the standard mac colorpicker, will place icons for these third party pickers after the standard mac colorpicker choices. Cool, right?
Look at where on the colorwheel bar and how they show up in your average mac application:
After the 5 icons for the standard colorpickers, I have icons for the following color pickers: (left to right)
Tangerine, Shades, Colorate's Hex Converter/Picker, and Painter's Picker.
And for prices that don't break your wallet, even though they are starting to add up (see a future article of mine called, "The Real Cost of owning a Mac") I'm still fairly satisfied. I might even buy them both.
Some other solutions that I'm not in love with or haven't really tried so much thus far (will update) are:
Tangerine (Priciest $39.95) and seems highly powerful, yet unwieldy so far...Seems to be great for STORING schemes, but offers no help creating schemes other than just picking with the magnifying glass or entering the color values numerically. That to me isn't very great for workflow. I'd rather just create a colorschemer scheme, export it as a gif, put the picture on my desktop or in my document temporarily and use the mac dropper to pick the colors out manually. There doesn't appear to be a way to export the color schemes either, so there's got to be some finite number of schemes held. That's not really strong enough for me for $40. I think software developers might appreciate this more than web or graphic designers.
and
Mondrianum (Leopard only and looks cute - but I just switched back to Tiger) - so I don't think I'll get a chance to try that one out just yet. From what I've seen thus far, it's not a creation tool, more a showcasing of color schemes shared on the Adobe Kuler site which is a part of the Adobe Air development/delivery platform. Don't really get it yet, but I know this app isn't what I need the most.
If you're reading this post and there aren't screenshots, please check back within a day. In an effort to lessen excuses and procrastination, I make myself write the article first and publish it, and THEN come back and jazz it up. Seems to work so far.
