Colour Collector is a plug-in for use with the Color Picker extension that comes with System 7.5 and later systems. This new Color Picker gives you much greater flexibility in picking colours, beyond selecting from a simple hue/saturation/brightness colour wheel: Apple also provides a set of RGB sliders, and third parties can provide additional alternative picking methods.
You can use Colour Collector in the following ways:
• You can copy a swatch of the currently-displayed colour to the Clipboard. This can be pasted back into a Colour Collector window at a later point, or saved in a scrapbook or clipping file, or used in some other way.
• You can paste any picture from the Clipboard into a Colour Collector window, and it will try to determine an appropriate colour to use.
• You can collect frequently-used colours in a set, give them descriptive names, save the current set in a file, and reload it later.
Colour Collector is shareware. If you find it useful, send me US$5 for a single-user licence, or US$50 for a site licence. My postal address is below.
To install Colour Collector, put a copy in your Extensions folder, and restart your Mac. Note that Colour Collector is not an “INIT”; it does not patch traps or do anything nasty to your system, so it should not be a source of incompatibilities.
Now bring up a colour-selection dialog in any convenient application, and you will see an additional icon labelled “Colour Collector” in the scrolling picker list at the left (click the “More Choices” button if you don’t see the icon list). Click on this icon to see the panel for Colour Collector:
The box on the right with the scrollbar underneath is a list displaying the currently-loaded set of colours to choose from. Initially this list will be empty: you can use the “Load Set...” button to load one of the sample colour sets included with Colour Collector. You can also modify this set by cutting and pasting colours. The “Rename...” button lets you assign names to colours in the set, for your own reference. You can also double-click the currently-visible list element to rename it.
The currently-loaded colour set is kept in a file called “Chanel Current Colours” in your Preferences folder, where it persists across invocations of Colour Collector. Alternatively, you can use the “Save Set as...” button to save a copy of this set of colours in a file elsewhere.
Frequently-Encountered Problems
Colour Collector is difficult to use from the “Colour” control panel in the Finder. Specifically, the colour list scrolls much too fast. This is because of a piece of stupidity in current versions of the Finder, which disable the standard system scrolling delay. (Thankfully, this doesn’t affect any applications other than the Finder.) You will find instructions on how to patch the Finder to fix this at my Mac Patch Page, on the World-Wide Web at <http://www2.waikato.ac.nz/ldo/macpatches.html>.
Some people have disabled the Color Picker extension because of the following problem: when they try to bring up a colour picker dialog with it installed, they get a message asking them to insert a disk with the same name as their startup disk. This is a bug, but not in the Color Picker extension: it is in fact a problem with your hard disk driver, which you should replace with a newer version.
As always, feel free to contact me with questions, bug reports or suggestions for improvement.
