Simon Willison’s Weblog

EyeDropper

Handy software tip courtesy of Tim (my colleague at Incutio). EyeDropper is a tiny shareware program for Windows which adds a magnifying glass to your mouse pointer, displaying the hex colour code of the pixel under your mouse pointer. The download is a measily 27KB and it saves having to print screen and load up a graphics package just to find a HTML colour code. When not in use it sits in your systray.

Posted 16th July 2002 at 12:20 pm

This is EyeDropper by Simon Willison, posted on 16th July 2002.

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5 comments

I know what you mean about firing up Paint to figure out the color... a pain in the neck. What would be really cool is if you could click, then drag the mouse and it would change the RGB components depending how far you dragged the pointer, displaying the new color and its hex code. Maybe there woulod be a little delay so that you wouldn't lose the original color through small accidental mouse movements. Google it! :)
Micah - 16th July 2002 11:50 - #
Oh, and onMouseUp it asks you whether you would like to copy the color to the Clipboard.
Micah - 16th July 2002 12:10 - #
That's a great idea - move the mouse up and down to change the brightness, left and right to change the hue (or something like that). I wouldn't have the first idea how to write one though :/
Simon - 16th July 2002 14:02 - #
This is useful! I've been using Eyedropper for years, and always cursed the lack of an obvious "copy colour value to clipboard" function. This has alerted me to the fact that it's been added in a newer version. (At least, I assume it has. Off to look now.)
francois - 16th July 2002 17:05 - #
I sure would like to have the code for the old eyedropper ..without all the new trappings....francois...anyone
russgri - 18th April 2004 04:14 - #

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Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2002/07/16/eyeDropper