Expanding the "standard 16" colours

Hope you don’t mind but I thought it might be worth exhuming my comments from the other thread:

I’d suggest an immediately helpful (and easy to implement) mod would be to print the HTML hex code #RRGGBB in contrasting colour in the sample colour swatch.

We could help further by, in RGB mode, having a pair of radio buttons to switch between percentage and underlying value.

Rather than having a uselessly large set of colour swatches to pick from, how about a drop-down list to select the colour set displayed therein, e.g. Window Manager standard, HTML greys, HTML reds…

None of the above would need an API change.

One could then augment that by allowing colour sets to be uploaded to the dialogue box, such as those already in use in the current document to help consistent selection, and for those suggested by, or in use anywhere in, the calling application (so you could load a Draw document as colour template with all the colours you want to use in any other drawing loaded).

desktop colours are referenced by meanings rather than having hardcoded colour values

This does rely on developers doing the right thing though. When we were doing Windows 7 testing at work, I remember one app came up with illegible toolbars with black text on a dark grey background. It turns out that the toolbar background had been set to InactiveTitle. In Windows XP and earlier, that was a light blue colour. In 7 it was almost black. Obviously that’s not the correct value for a toolbar background, and the original developer had just picked something that they liked the look of.

What would be the use case for this? While you can specify window/icon colours in the Templates, by and large people use the defaults and the Wimp can do some things automatically (like pasting in a background pattern) or handling themes.

Doesn’t that line of thinking rather suppose that no one will ever do a proper theme manager.
i.e. One where the colours of the application window borders are the users preference and not the developers preference or a house style.

I’ll leave it up to implementation whether or not it persists across reboots, but it should be platform specific, not app specific, so the colours in use can be shared (say, between Draw , ArtWorks, a DTP, and so on).

The idea that the colours I’ve used are remembered across applications really appeals to me. An extended standard set is still a good idea though.

I’ve raised the question of a larger standard set before – ideally a user-definable set, that can be saved to a file so you can have a choice of alternative sets, and can share your preferred set with others. I’d be happy with a 24 or 32 patch user-definable swatch…

This would be very useful in !Draw. My http://clive.semmens.org.uk/RISCOS/XP1ReDraw.html could really use it. Sadly implementing a colour picker fro !Draw is way beyond my capabilities – I could probably hack the existing one to give a different set of 16 colours, but I took a look and decided I couldn’t possibly create a 24 or 32 colour version :-(

I would also opt for recent colours.

Also what one could think about is a fourth colour model showing 256 colour palettes like in the select version of the ColourPicker. Ok, I know in Select it was the fifth colour model ;-)

And I would like to see a palette icon which allows you to pick the colour from any pixel currently shown on the desktop – this would be very handy in my opinion.

There’s plenty of RISC OS software which has had to tackle this problem in the past, and have implemented their own custom colour pickers. Instead of reinventing the wheel, perhaps we should adopt the best features of those. Or in reality have endless arguments about which one was the best.

The reason I’d like more than 16 but a lot less than 256 is mainly for colour-coded diagrams. Even just the possibility of having alternative sets of 16 colours would be an improvement for that purpose: I’d swap several of the greys for a few colours.

For colour coded diagrams you want a set of colours that are all easily distinguishable – enough to give you some choice, but not so many that any of them can be mistaken for each other.

A set like that would also be handy for an app like my ReDraw, that converts coloured lines (or rectangles) into things like roads or railways for maps, or chains, or other patterned lines.