Quick Color Picking with Pipette
Pipette is a tiny Mac OS X only application which lets you sample any color on your screen as a hex value and copy it to your clipboard. To use the app, simply drag from the color picker window to the area of the screen you want to sample. While dragging, the app displays a magnified representation of the area your mouse is in, and also give you a live preview of that area’s hex value. When you’ve found your spot, release the mouse and both previews are frozen and ready to copy.
By default, pressing Cmd + C will copy the value as well as the ‘#’ sign, which makes the value easy to paste into a CSS template. To copy the color without the ‘#’ sign, double click on the hex value in the app’s window before copying. Simple.
I love simple utilities like Pipette. Mac OS X of course has the built in DigitalColor Meter, which will return 8 bit hex color values to you when mousing over a screen area. But DigitalColor Meter is far more complicated to use and requires remembering a bunch of keyboard shortcuts to take advantage of even its basic features. Pipette simplifies on-screen color picking to the point where it feels almost like an extension of the application that you are picking color for.
Pipette is one of the applications that make designing a little bit easier, and its ‘do one thing and do it well’ philosophy combined with its light weight and ease of use make it a great alternative to DigitalColor Meter.
Pipette is available from Charcoal Design as Freeware.
