Pika

A free, open-source colour picker app for macOS

4.8•22 reviews•

148 followers

A free, open-source colour picker app for macOS

4.8•22 reviews•

148 followers

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Design resources

Pika (pronounced pi·kuh, like picker) is an easy to use, open-source, native colour picker for macOS. Pika makes it simple to quickly find colours on screen, in the format you need, so you can get on with being a speedy, successful designer.

Launch tags:

Mac•Design Tools•Open Source

Launch Team

Charlie Gleason

Pika

Maker

Hey everyone, Charlie here—I designed and developed Pika, a free, open-source colour picker app for macOS. At its core, it's an accessibility focused menu bar utility for quickly finding colours onscreen, with a bunch of features: ✨ Quick access to colour contrast ratio and WCAG compliance ✨ Hex, RGB, HSL, and HSB formats (for both display and copying and pasting) ✨ Global and local keyboard shortcuts ✨ Native support for Intel and M1 Macs ✨ Support for RGB colour spaces It is also, in part, me fulfilling a longtime dream of making and releasing a Mac app. I gave myself the wasteland between Christmas and New Year, and bought a bunch of books on Swift (which are all already out of date), and locked myself in my study. I learnt an absolute ton, and had a really great time doing it. What started as an app became an app, a repo, a website, a distribution toolchain, a logo, a brand, and a really wild detour into the deep and dark woods of certificate signing. It also showed me just how much time there is in a day when you can't leave the house. It's built in Swift and SwiftUI, with Apple's Metal framework powering the visualisations. All the code is on GitHub, and I'd love people to contribute there, whether with pull requests or feedback. I have a lot of plans for it, but primarily, it solves a problem I had with quickly and easily checking the accessibility of colours across different apps, and then getting those out in different formats. Thanks for taking the time to check it out, and a massive thanks to @chrismessina for sharing it, and for generally being great. Charlie. 💜

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4yr ago

Ozgur Ozer

AI Renamer

@superhighfives I love the app and I want a feature request. It would be great after we press the global shortcuts it starts picking whether foreground or background color, so it will be faster choosing any color on the screen. Right now it's a 2 step job.

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4yr ago

Charlie Gleason

Pika

Maker

@ozgrozer Thanks for the kind words! We've been chatting about how this might work on GitHub—will message you the issue (it's #20). Some of the questions have been around how to decide whether to pick foreground or background, and if it should be the default behaviour. Would love to get your thoughts.

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4yr ago