Download, Install, or Update the best Mac apps - MacUpdate. Dec 15, 2017  In order to use the color picker in macOS as a stand alone app, you need to access it via an Apple Script. Open the AppleScript app on your Mac. It’s in the Utilities folder. With the app open, enter the following.

I love FileMaker 13’s new style tools! The tools make creating and maintaining a consistent theme style for a project, incredibly simple. After attending the FileMaker DevCon session, Layouts: Under the Hood, I love them even more. A tool that I’ve been using lately, to aid in creating custom themes for our clients, is the built in Mac OS X Color Picker, specifically the color palette tab. The Mac OS X Color Picker’s color palette tab allows you to add specifically-picked colors to a saved list. Using this, I can take a list of branded colors from a client, add them to a palette, and then start creating my FileMaker theme with the exact colors needed.

Creating a New Palette with Mac OS X Color Picker

To create a new palette with the built-in Mac OS X Color Picker:

• In FileMaker Pro, select any color tool that allows you to pick a color
• Select the Color Palettes tab
• From the gear icon next to the current palette’s name, select New, as shown in the image below:

• The new palette created will show as Unnamed. Select the gear icon again, and select Rename to give your palette a custom name

Saving Colors

You have a number of ways to save colors to the color palette.

The Color Selector

• Probably, the simplest way of grabbing colors to add to a palette is to use the color selector. This is the little spyglass found in the upper left corner of the color picker.

With this tool, you can literally point the spyglass at the color you want to capture. For example, let’s grab the colors from the FileMaker website. With a new palette created called FileMaker Website, I’ll…

• Bring up the website in a browser and then switch back to my FileMaker Color Picker.

• Click on the Color Selector icon.

When you do this, your cursor will change to a spyglass with a crosshair in the lens. You can hover over the color you want to select on the website. Once you have the color you want, you can click to capture it in your color picker.

• Once the color has been selected, you can click the plus sign (+), at the bottom of your palette, to add it to your list.

A double-click of the color’s title will allow you to change its name. This will allow you to quickly walk through an image to build a palette which you can in turn use to create your theme.

Hexadecimal Values

• The color picker is great, but sometimes you’re looking for an exact color.

A free plugin called Hex Color Picker will allow you to specify hexadecimal values for specific colors.

Hues

• Hues is an application available on the Mac App Store that turns the built-in OS X Color Picker into a standalone app.

This way, you don’t need to bring up FileMaker Pro to add colors to your palette. This is particularly helpful if you do development in other languages or platforms.

Sharing

• Building the palettes are great for your personal development, but they really start to shine when you share them with others.

The gear icon in the palette tab allows you to Open pre-existing palettes. This imports the palette into your local palette list. Unfortunately, the Mac OS X Color Picker doesn’t give an easy way to export a palette you’ve built, to pass it on to someone else. Luckily for us, we’re developers; so, we like getting our hands dirty! 😉 Here’s a work-around: The palettes are stored in your local folder: ~/Library/Colors You can get to the folder by either:

Registered or unbuffered for mid-2010 mac pro 1. In order for the system to utilize all 64GB (if installed) the system must be booted into 64 bit mode. If you use the Crucial 16GB Kit (CT1421785) or 24GB Kit (CT1469661) all previous existing memory must be removed.

• Opening Terminal and typing in the command: open ~/Library/Colors/
• Selecting the Finder, clicking the Go menu, selecting Go to Folder and typing in the path: ~/Library/Colors/

Once in the folder, you’ll see a list of .clr files. These are your palettes. You can pass a copy of these files to someone else and they can use the above mentioned Open option in the color palette to import your palette.

Omnipresence

One of the best reasons to use the built-in Mac OS X Color Picker, is that the palettes are available in any application that uses the built-in color picker. This means, if you like to use a tool like Omnigraffle to do layout wire framing, you can use the exact colors from your palette. Christopher Schmitz is a FileMaker 13 Certified Developer at Skeleton Key. About Skeleton KeySkeleton Key helps turn complex, complicated, and outdated systems into true information platforms. Our team of consultants and developers do this by developing custom-fit software tools and reporting dashboards that help businesses find, use, and understand their data, freeing them to focus on and grow their core business. In addition to custom databases and applications, we also provide training and coaching for getting the most out of your existing systems and understanding your unruly data. Skeleton Key is an open-book management company and active player of the Great Game of Business.

In LayOut, whenever you click a color swatch (like the swatches in the Shape Style panel) or select Window > Colors, LayOut transports you to the Colors panel, where you have a half dozen ways to choose and organize the colors for your LayOut document.

Navigating the Colors panel interface

As you pick out color swatches like a TV-show decorator with thirty minutes to makeover a whole home, some interface elements appear wherever you go in the Colors panel. Here’s a quick introduction to the tools and features the Colors panel always keeps at your fingertips (or mouse pointer):

1. Tabs: Each tab holds a different type of color picker, such as a wheel, color sliders, and so on.
2. Eyedropper tool: Select the Eyedropper tool to select any color visible on-screen as the active color.
3. Active color well: Here, you see the current color selection. You can drag and drop this color onto any shape in your LayOut document to apply the color as a fill or into any visible color well.
4. User palette: To keep a color for later use, drag and drop the color from any visible color well. Dropping a new color over an existing color replaces the color. If you need to see more wells, click and drag the size handle at the bottom of the Colors panel to expand the number of visible color wells.
5. User palette: To keep a color for later use, drag and drop the color from the active color well (3) to a square on the palette. Dropping a new color over an existing color replaces the color. If you need to see more wells, click and drag the size handle at the bottom of the Colors panel to expand the number of visible color wells. Note that you can no longer use this palette as a library for material textures.
6. Opacity slider: This slider changes your color's opacity, or how transparent the color is. When the Opacity is set to 100%, the color is opaque. As the Opacity percentage decreases, the color becomes more transparent.

The callouts in the following figure correspond to the numbers in the preceding list.

Selecting a color from the color wheel

The color wheel picker arranges the color hue radially around the wheel, with the highest saturation at the wheel’s outer edge. The color wheel is the simplest and most versatile of your color-picking options, although the color wheel is also the least precise.

The following steps walk you through the color wheel options:

1. To select a color, click a color hue on the color wheel. The color you select appears in the active color well.
2. (Optional) To adjust the color’s brightness, drag the brightness slider (to the right of the color wheel) or type a percentage in the box above the slider.

Choosing colors precisely with RGB, HSB, Grayscale, or CMYK sliders

The Colors panel has sliders that enable you to enter precise color values, using any of the following methods:

• RGB: RGB colors are traditionally used to specify on-screen colors. Use a slider to specify a red, green, and blue value. These values mix to create the color you see in the active color well.
• HSB: HSB is another system used to specify on-screen colors, but in this case, you set hue, saturation, and brightness values. Because the saturation value has its own slider, this method is especially intuitive if you want a desaturated color.
• Grayscale: When you want a pure gray (without any color undertones), check out the grayscale slider.
• CMYK: On Mac OS X only, you find sliders for setting CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) color values, a system used in professional printing, where colors are specified using percentages of four basic ink colors.

To select a color using any of the sliders, follow these steps:

1. Select the tab that corresponds to the color system you want to use: RGB, HSB, or Grays.
2. Click and drag a slider to set a value for each option, or type a numerical value in the box next to each slider. For example, if you know your document needs to use an RGB value of Red 255, Green 122, and Blue 50, you can type those values in the boxes, as shown in the following figure. If you select the HSB tab, you see Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders. If you select the Grays tab, you see a Gray slider.

1. At the top of the Colors panel, select the Color Sliders tab.
2. From the menu at the top of the tab, select the color value system you want to use: Gray Scale Slider, RGB Sliders, CMYK Sliders, or HSB Sliders. In the following figure, HSB Sliders is selected.
3. Click and drag a slider to set a value for each option, or type a numerical value in the box next to each slider. For example, if you know your document needs to use an HSB value of Hue 21, Saturation 80, and Brightness 100, you can type those values in the boxes, as shown in the following figure. If you select the Gray Scale Slider option, you see a Brightness slider as well as five grayscale preset values. If you select the RGB Sliders option, you see Red, Green, and Blue sliders plus the color’s Hex Color number (also called a hexadecimal value). If you select the CMYK Sliders option, you see Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black sliders.
4. (Optional) To limit your color options to a specific color profile, click the gear icon (to the right of the drop-down menu) to see color profile options related to the color value system you selected.
   Note: Typically, you use color profiles to help match what you see on screen to the color profile set for your printer. In most cases, the default color profile works just fine. If you’re working with a printing service, the service technician can tell you whether you need to select a specific color profile.

Picking up colors from an image

Have an image with the colors you need, but aren’t sure of the colors’ specific values? Check out the image feature on the Colors panel, which enables you to load an image into the color picker and select colors from anywhere in that image.

By default, you see a spectrum. To load your image and start picking colors, follow these steps:

1. On the Colors panel, click the Image tab.
2. Click the Choose Image button.
3. In the Open dialog box that appears, navigate to the image you want to load in the color picker and select it.
4. Click the Open button. Your image appears in the color picker, as shown in the following figure.
5. Click the image to select a color. Remember that you can also click and drag the cursor around the image to see a dynamic preview of colors in the active color well.

1. On the Colors panel, click the Image Palettes tab.
2. Click the gear icon next to the drop-down list, and select New from File from the menu that appears. Or if you’ve copied an image to the clipboard, select New from Clipboard.
3. In the New Color Palette dialog box that appears, navigate to the image you want to load in the color picker and select it.
4. Click the Open button. Your image appears in the color picker, as shown in the following figure.
5. Click the image to select a color. Remember that you can also click and drag the cursor around the image to see a dynamic preview of colors in the active color well.

Selecting colors from preset lists

LayOut’s Colors panel includes color presets that you can choose from a list. To select from these presets, follow these steps:

1. Click the List tab.
2. Scroll through the list of colors and click a color to make it the active color.

1. At the top of the Colors panel, select the Color Palettes tab.
2. From the drop-down list at the top, select a palette. By default, this menu includes palettes for basic Apple colors, Web Safe colors, and Crayon colors (which are also available on the Crayons tab). If you define a custom palette, as explained in the following Tip, you can select that palette from this list, too.
3. From the list of colors that appears, select a color to make it the active color. If you can’t find a color, try typing its name in the Search box.

On Mac OS X, you can create a custom palette of colors that you define. Here’s how:

1. With the Color Palettes tab selected, click the gear icon and select New from the menu that appears. In the new Unnamed palette that appears, the active color becomes the first color in your palette.
2. To add more colors, choose a new active color and click the plus sign icon next to the Search box. Or, simply drag a color into the list. To delete a color that you’ve added, select it in the list and click the minus sign icon.
3. (Optional) To give the color palette a name, click the gear icon and select Rename. In the box that appears, type a name and click the Rename button.
4. (Optional) To rename a color, double-click it and type a new name.

In the following figure, you see a custom color palette for an ice cream shop.