Gestures on eyedropper button

[sona-mini-studio]

Inspired by the new release v1.1, here popped out a new idea about UI feature. This might be useless or potentially useful. Anyway I think it worth sharing so you could evaluate (and decide whether to adopt it).

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Describe the solution you'd like

Gestures can be added on the UI of eyedropper button.

I don't do specialized design works. What I can do currently is a demo about how it looks and animates (and you might imagine how it feels).

Pika.Gesture.Demo.mov

In this demo, people could:

• Rotate to adjust Hue component
• Scroll horizontally to adjust Saturation component
• Scroll vertically to adjust Brightness component

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context

This demo is just scratch now and only applies to HSB mode and trackpad gestures. I noticed that colors must be converted bidirectionally. So I couldn't make it for some modes like LAB (without doing maths and writing additional code).

[superhighfives]

Oooh, I love this idea, and I think it's a really nice way of allowing some color tweaking without needing the full system palette. I guess the big question would be how to communicate this to users (because it could be frustrating if you pick a color and accidentally scroll and it changes it, so, effectively, how do you undo / disable / educate) and how the bidirectional conversion for all the different modes.

[Ultra23Ahan]

You could fix that by holding down a hotkey(say command) and then scrolling to change the hue.

[sona-mini-studio]

This feature may be at very low priority but should be "far better at some key things", or it'd better not exist. So I think and wait for a seamless design (or have to abort if not found). Simply scrolling on the eyedropper, if would be the final interface, must be optional and configurable in the settings.

I've initially thought about modifierKey-scrolling. (Cmd-scroll to change component A, Shift-scroll to change component B, …) This is a doable way but can't be the major one. It isn't intuitive enough[1]. I'm looking for a potential extra feeling in UI using gestures. There's also a little risk of conflicting to an accessibility feature[2] I know, making everything a bit more complex.

[1]: This is for me because my initial inspiration was mapping between the trackpad and (a, b) in LAB colorspace.
[2]: Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom. As far as I remembered, the default keys is a single one rather than a multiple combination.

[Ultra23Ahan]

Another idea i have for this is that you can navigate/traverse with your trackpad for example scrolling down with 2 fingers could make the colour blueish and other colours in other directions.

[sona-mini-studio]

@Ultra23Ahan Nice idea! Much like color wheels i think (in apps like Final Cut, Pixelmator, etc.)

Unfortunately, if this UI would be color wheels…for now I don't have any knowledge about how people use them in other apps. This impacts how algorithms would work behind the UI.

Thanks again for your helpful idea.

[Ultra23Ahan]

Maybe a hotkey or a button(placed next to the copy button) could be pressed to open the system colour picker, where the colour is already picked. Then, the user can tweak the colour in any way the like and click "Done". This would transfer the colour to Pika, allowing the user to copy the colour in the colour space of their choice.

[superhighfives]

I believe this already exists when hovering on a color in Pika, unless I'm misunderstanding?

[sona-mini-studio]

Pika can already call the system color picker, and this seems the only way so far to interact with sliders and exact values.

So...I discovered that something like exactly getting LAB(.50, .25, .35) is beyond the system color picker could do.

We might need custom UI like we see in some apps. System color picker can be kept. Future gestures support might be integrated into this UI.

[Ultra23Ahan]

I believe this already exists when hovering on a color in Pika, unless I'm misunderstanding?

Ah, yes I was mistaken. Thank you for correcting me.

[Ultra23Ahan]

Pika can already call the system color picker, and this seems the only way so far to interact with sliders and exact values.

So...I discovered that something like exactly getting LAB(.50, .25, .35) is beyond the system color picker could do.

We might need custom UI like we see in some apps. System color picker can be kept. Future gestures support might be integrated into this UI.

Also, the custom UI could maybe add more tweaking capabilities or more verbosity about the colours.