Managing colour selection on Windows

[SWEdeAndy]

Recently, I’ve had the misfortune to have to work with LiveCode in Windows 10.

I’ll spare you my rant about the ugliness/clunkiness of it all (comes with the territory), but one thing in particular annoys the hell out of me:
Selecting colours from the colour palette/chooser thingy!

On Mac we have Apple’s multi-facetted colour chooser with five different panes, some of them with four different styles/methods for selecting colours. Many different lists with colour names, ’web safe’ colours, crayons, spectrums, you name it.

On Windows, we get this (disregard the Swedish locale):

THIS!!!

Seriously!?

I’m colour blind and need colour names indicated to help me tell apart shades of e.g. green vs brown, blue vs violet etc. And even if you have normal colour sight, it must still be so much easier to work with the Mac style colour palettes than the poor, crappy Win excuse for a colour chooser, right?! (It doesn’t even save the customs colours you pick, till next time!)

So, those of you using LiveCode on Windows - what workarounds do you have for colour selection?

I’m seriously thinking of building my own colour selection console to sidestep the Windows default atrocity.
But I can't be the first person considering reinvention of that wheel - right...?

[richmond62]

Not much better on Linux.

But, hang on while I finish my supper and turn my computer on because I do have a mad idea.

[richmond62]

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I have just "stolen" the colour chooser stack from MetaCard (!!!) and made it a substack of a stack called 'Holder',
it throws error messages when you open it: BUT . . .
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[richmond62]

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These snapshots are from Macintosh: but I suspect they will be the same on Windows

(they show up as much the same on Linux):

and I suspect the colour names will be extremely useful for you.

[richmond62]

Oops: feeling stupid as forgot to attach the stack.

Sorry.

[SWEdeAndy]

Thanks Richmond! Yes, something like that is what I have in mind, and then make it apply on the selectedObject or something, like the Object Inspector does. And I'd add some feature for saving custom RGB values.

[SparkOut]

I'm not colourblind, so my experience can't be measured the same way, but I don't have a problem with Windows or its colour picker.
I do or have worked on both Mac and Linux (a few Debian distros, and mostly Mepis and more latterly Mint).
There are advantages and disadvantages to all, and it's all subjective, but I would say Windows is the best O/S and best UX. (So stone me, it's fashionable.)
That said, I do wish that there was a bit more cross-platform parity in a cross-platform product, and a little less focus on Apple/iOS, but on the whole, the mothership do create an admirably platform independent environment.



PS when I can get on a computer, I will try and see what Richmond's stack looks like on Windows.

[richmond62]

Somewhere "down the line" the LiveCode people decided to remove the integrated colour chooser
they had inherited from MetaCard and replace it with something that opened into the colour chooser
of the operating system the IDE was working on: and, if you are running things on a Macintosh
computer that's all very fine and dandy, but if you are running things elsewhere things are just not so good.

At the weekend I shall have a poke at RevMedia 4.0 and LiveCode 6.x.x. on some of my groovy 'mature' Macs
and see if I can work out when that decision was taken.

[richmond62]

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THIS is also worth playing with.

[FourthWorld]

I do wish that there was a bit more cross-platform parity in a cross-platform product

All three LC desktop implementations use the default OS-provided color picker users on each platform are most accustomed to seeing, don't they?

[richmond62]

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Certainly, as far back as RevMedia 4 (here on MacOS 10.7.5) RR/LC used the operating system's own colour chooser.

[SparkOut]

I do wish that there was a bit more cross-platform parity in a cross-platform product

All three LC desktop implementations use the default OS-provided color picker users on each platform are most accustomed to seeing, don't they?

Yes it does, for the colour picker and many other features. If I wasn't on a phone and finding it cumbersome to type, I would have mentioned that too. There are some areas where cross platform features within LiveCode are not the same (eg browser implementation on Linux) but the mothership do a largely admirable job in keeping LC multi platform.

[richmond62]

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I wonder where THIS is in the Windows version . . .

[SWEdeAndy]

Ideally, I would like to hack the IDE so that when I click on one of these buttons in the object inspector, I get my custom colour picker instead of the default OS one:

oi.png (14.39 KiB) Viewed 3518 times

Anyone knows which lines of which script of which stack I'd need to hack for that, and how to avoid generally breaking LiveCode in the process...?
(Yes, I would experiment on a copy/separate version, but still... I'll feel like a janitor doing brain surgery... )

[stam]

SShot 2022-12-01 at 23.01.58.png
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THIS is also worth playing with.

You could just use the stack I published on SampleStacks/liveCodeShare some time ago. I used FerrusLogic's TinyColor library as an easy way to set the text color to always be appropriate for the backgroundColor and included a quick 'search' function.

Recently, Bernd very kindly made some suggestions to sort the grey values correctly (so they follow a text rather than numerical sequence) and to copy the the RGB values, in a addition to the original copying of the colourName... double-click on a color to copy the colorName constant or right-click to copy the RGB values...

Drop it into your plugins folder to use as plugin (that's what I do). Look for it in Sample Stacks or the web front end to this on LiveCodeShare:
https://livecodeshare.runrev.com/stack/982/SkColorNames

HTH
Stam