Monday, August 4, 2008

Native Ubuntu/Gnome Alternative to Colorpix

One of the applications I've missed most when transitioning from Windows 2000/XP to Ubuntu Linux is Colorpix, a useful little color picker that grabs the pixel under your mouse and transforms it into a number of different color formats.

I tried gcolor2, but wasn't very fond of it. gcolor2 included a bunch of functionality I didn't need and not enough of the functionality I wanted. Perhaps the functionality with the largest weight on my decision making was the magnified section provided by Colorpix for making sure I get the color for the pixel I want. It might seem obvious in some instances when you're over the color you want without magnification, but alot of times I'm looking for the color of a single pixel wide line & it's nice to know I need to move left one pixel instead of moving right a few pixels before realizing I'm going the wrong direction.

My other alternative, was using colorpix through Wine like some bloggers have mentioned here and here.
The only problem I had with that is I don't always have Wine up and running, so it can take a few seconds to load.


So, since I'm trying to pickup C/C++ I decided to write my own implementation of Colorpix to run natively on my Ubuntu system.
So far it starts instantly VS waiting for a translator to load, displays the color in RGB and hexidecimal format, and magnifies an 11x11 pixel area around the pointer 2000%

I've made the source available via a project named Picksel at Google Code.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sweet! I will give it a shot! Thanks for the contact about this as it sounds like it will work much better!

Joe Kovar said...

Sure thing. :)

I like it when people leave comments about their projects on posts in my blog, so I figured I'd "pass it on".

Anonymous said...

What about kcolorchooser?

Chad S. said...

Thank you so much. I also missed Colorpix when I switched to Ubuntu and Picksel is a great alternative.