Hues and Spot Color
Zach Waugh •
When the Mac App Store came out, I decided to update my app – Spot Color, and release it as a new app called Hues. That’s caused a bit of confusion about how Hues is different from Spot Color, so I thought I’d explain a bit of the differences and reasoning.
Spot Color was just a wrapper around the built-in Mac OS X color picker, and had no features of its own. It allowed you to use the color picker as an app, and wasn’t useful without installing some 3rd-party plugins. My main goal with Hues was for it to be fully featured and stand on its own without needing any other plugins. With Hues, you can grab colors, get the Hex, RGB, or HSL out of it, custom format the outputs, have the value automatically copied to the clipboard, and view a history of recent colors. All of those features are new to Hues, and didn’t exist in Spot Color.
To avoid having two different color pickers with the same icon, different features, one free and one paid, I decided to just get rid of Spot Color, changing the name to Hues in the process to make it clear it was a whole new app. I thought it be too confusing to have both out there. Plus, I wasn’t going to update Spot Color anymore, so thought it best to remove it.
If you liked Spot Color, I think you’ll love Hues.