SmartColor
SmartColor is the cool, universal, powerful, free, easy-to-use color picker for Windows. The current version is 1.02, but development is likely not ever to continue. I hope you like it anyway.
SmartColor is known to run under Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP. If you know it runs or does not run under other versions of Windows, I'd like to know about it.
Features
SmartColor's most outstanding features are the following:
- Looks a lot like photoshop's color picker, but is a lot better.
- Full real time updating. You see the colors change while you drag the sliders.
- Support for RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and photoshop-compatible HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) color modes.
- Support and automatic adjustment for all 216 cross-platform web colors. SmartColor makes it easy to pick the nearest web color of any color you want.
- Advanced support for all 140 named colors. As with the web colors, SmartColor always tells you which named color is nearest to the currently selected color.
- Ability to copy a color to the clipboard in a variety of formats.
- Ability to minimize to the tray, to stay on top of other windows and much more.
- SmartColor can save any number of colors to your hard disk. This is very handy if you use the same colors over and over.
- Complete and nice-looking documentation in HTML Help format.
- Nice installer/uninstaller.
- Over 50,000 downloads. Okay, this isn't a feature, but it's worth being mentioned anyway.
Awards
- Six ducks from Nonags (Best)
- Maximum rating from SoftLandIndia.
- Maximum rating from WebAttack.
- ...and some others.
Screenshots
I don't run Windows anymore, so I can't get more screenshots. This is the "official" one.
Kent Lins read this and sent me another one. Thanks Kent!
Download
Download SmartColor: smartcolor102.zip (380 KB).
Bugs
As said above, I don't maintain SmartColor any more. The home page and the e-mail address specified in the about box are obsolete; the new home is http://www.isotton.com/software/windows/smartcolor/, and the e-mail address for questions and support is aaron@isotton.com.
Sometimes it happens that SmartColor's window doesn't appear any more after you've minimized it. You have to stop SmartColor (make sure it's really stopped with the task manager), start up regedit, search for all entries with "SmartColor" in them and delete them. When you restart SmartColor everything will be fine.
The SmartColor zip archive contains two files: the installer executable and a PGP signature. That PGP signature does not match my public key anymore, because I lost the old one in one of many Windows crashes (which is one of the causes for my change to Linux). My new public key is not a PGP key, anyway, but a GPG one.
You like SmartColor? You can help!
If you like SmartColor and are proficient in (Visual) C++ and the Win32 API, I'd be glad if you took the development of SmartColor over. SmartColor makes no use of MFC, only of the plain Win32 API; it should thus be possible to port it to other compilers as well.
The source code is currently in an uncompilable state because of excessive tinkering from my side; that's why I don't offer it for download. If you are seriously interested in becoming the new maintainer, I'd be prepared to bring it back into a compilable state and to release it under the GNU General Public License. Be warned: the source code is not very clear, and it is written in what I consider "bad style" now. I started the development of SmartColor as a finger exercise, and it has evolved.