Mac OS X's Color Picker

Macworld's Rob Griffith posted an interesting How To, Secrets of the Color Picker.

If you’ve used a Mac for any length of time at all, you’re probably familiar with the Color Picker. The Color Picker is a small floating window through which you can choose colors for text, objects, lines, and other objects (depending on which application you’re in when using it, of course). You can call up the color picker from any Cocoa application (TextEdit, Mail, Keynote, Pages, etc.) by hitting Shift-Command-C. Other programs, such as Word and Excel, don’t use Apple’s color picker at all, so the following tips won’t apply to those programs. Finally, some programs such as Photoshop offer the option to use either the Adobe color picker or Apple’s color picker. Obviously, you’ll have to be using Apple’s color picker in those programs in order to use these tips.

The first thing to realize about Apple’s color picker is that it’s a relatively complex interface element. You’re probably most familiar with the picker’s default look, which is the color wheel interface. But using the small toolbar at the top of the window, you can choose from four additional styles: Color Sliders, Color Palettes, Image Palettes, and (the most fun) Crayons.

The first tip is one that you may be familiar with—you can save often-used colors in the small white boxes at the bottom of the window. Simply choose the color you’d like to save, then drag and drop it from the color bar area into a white box at the bottom of the screen. But what if you want to save more than 16 colors? That’s also easy, if not quite so obvious: just drag the small dot at the bottom of the window downward, and you’ll reveal up to 10 rows of 16 boxes. You can see examples of both saving colors and the extra boxes in this short video clip...