A review of CliqCliq COLORS for Apple iPhone

Posted: November 21, 2008 at 12.31 am
Posted by Graham Smith in Featured, iPhone

Guest Post by Martin Newham
Follow Martin on Twitter - @mjnewham

A review of CliqCliq COLORS

Designers are a funny bunch, their brains always ticking away reviewing and analysing everything around them. Many never leave home without a notepad or even a laptop. Thankfully design company “cliqcliq” have developed a new tool for the Apple iPhone to supplement the designer’s arsenal; it’s called “COLORS”.

Inspiration for design is all around and no guesses which aspect cliqcliq COLORS helps us with! So what can COLORS help us with? If you use Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator you’re in for a treat it allows designers to;

1. Discover new colors and easily convert RGB/HSB/Greyscale values into Hex values
2. Manage colors with the ability to save, name, and favourite palettes.
3. Extract color palettes from photos taken with the iPhone camera or import them from the iPhone’s Photo Library
4. Email palettes to yourself and others using the iPhone’s Contact library, or manually entered emails. There is no limit on the number of palettes you can email, or the number contacts to whom you can send a palette.
5. Palettes emailed from the phone include file formats compatible with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, as well as a BMP file that you can sample colors from, and finally a text file containing RGB and Hex values.

Let’s see it in action.

Opening up the application shows any color swatches you’ve previously created. From here you can select individual swatches and edit them to your heart’s content; but more about that later.

Let’s suppose you’re out on your daily walk, you see a color that would be ideal for that new site your building for a client, reach for you iPhone and snap that photo!

Sitting on the park bench you start up cliqcliq COLOR and load the photo; don’t forget you can also take picture from within COLOR as well!

From the picture of the duck COLORS takes all the major colors of the image and fills palette below the image. If it didn’t quite capture the color you were after you can zoom into the picture to make the color more prominent.

Touching the color squares will lock them into the palette while you extract other colors form the image. Once you are happy with the palette, removing any that you don’t want by highlighting the squares and touching trash. You can click on the item button bottom left to save the swatch.

Once you’ve saved the swatch you can tweak it in many ways viewing the color in RGB, HSB or Gray, the HEX for the selected color (blue) can also be seen.

You can touch and copy the color to another slot, overwriting the destination or if you have a vacant square all is well, this helps juggling the colors into an order if you feel you need to.

Touching one of the smaller squares copies the color to the larger panel at the top, from here you can change all aspects of the color. To copy it back simply touch and drag to a location in the palette at the bottom.

So after creating the perfect palette for the site sitting on the bench in the park (totally billable time of course) it’s time to send it home.

From the list of all your wonderful creations touch to the blue circle, the screen will change allowing you to re-edit the colors if you want, set it as a favourite or give it a sensible name.

It also gives you the option to email the swatch home. Emailing it will actually send it back to cliqcliq where it will be formatted for Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. A few moments later a freshly composed email will arrive at the selected destination with a graphic swatch panel and download links for;

They are stored on cliqcliq’s servers for 15days which is ample time to download your creations.

So, how was it

Overall the application works well; if you are trying to pick out a color from an image – such as the blue in the ducks wing, you may need to zoom into the image. Likewise the selecting/deselecting of the squares can be tiresome; I would like to see a “select/unselect all” button, as well as a “save” button in the main color adjustment screen as I have found that COLOR will save blank swatches if you touch “+” (add) and then immediately return to the list page.

The above points are very minor, that I’m sure will be resolved in future releases – but other than that it’s a very useful tool for any 24/7 designer that never really stops. For what is realistically just loose change in your pocket it’s a flexible tool for the designer!

You can follow cliqcliq on Twitter or their Blog.

And to nicely round things off

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