What colour is that?

Being colourblind, “What colour is that?” is a question I’ve had to ask too many times. If there’s no one around to check with it means taking a screenshot and dissecting the CMYK values (I still can’t think in RGB) in a graphics editor. Do-able, but a bit of a pain the ass quite frankly. In particular, the hardest for me are those itty-bitty colour swatches you get in Photoshop and Fireworks. The smaller the area of colour, the harder it is for me to distinguish blue from purple, grey from pink and green from brown.

A wonderful new app for OS X has been released, called Color Decoder, and it solves this problem in a really simple way. Just hover over an element with the loupe and the colour is displayed in a way that I can understand:

My eyes and sanity are saved!