I have used a few color picker programs over the years, and downloaded Ades Design Color Picker 2.0 the other day to try it out. There are a few different reasons that I have used color pickers before. One is for web pages. When I designed my template for this site, I purchased a banner and a basic template for a web page, but then I had to convert it to a movabletype template and create a few pages that of course never existed in the original template. I used my banner header to set the basic color screen and had to use a color picker to get just the right shades so that it would all piece together well.
I have also used color pickers when making new skins for Windowblinds and DesktopX. I always want to make sure that the various elements fit together properly just like I do when working on my web site.
Color Picker 2.0 is pretty cool. It is small and lightweight. It runs in the system tray, and while just sitting there it was only using 2560k of memory. Pretty minuscule with the amounts of memory in today’s computers. There are several options that you can set in color picker as shown in the shot below.
While in Demo mode only RGB is available, but the program is available for purchase for $9.90 and get the rest of the features unlocked, such as getting HTML color codes.
Here is a shot of the actual program at work.
To activate the program you can right-click the icon, or use the ctrl-shift-a hotkey at which point the little viewfinder with color codes pops up. To get it to go away you just have to right-click the desktop.
Overall the program does exactly what it is supposed to and does it well. Although there are plenty of free color-pickers out there this one offers a few more options than most and is well worth the $9.90 that it costs. You can find out more information about Color Picker as well as some other cool programs at AdesBlog.com