FR: A better color picker (the brand-new FL 20.7 color picker still too complicated)

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Scoox
Wed May 20, 2020 6:10 pm

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FR: A better color picker (the brand-new FL 20.7 color picker still too complicated)

The new color picker in FL 20.7 looks very nice and it is a huge upgrade from the old picker, but it still fails to address the two key problems of the old picker:

● Too many clicks needed
● Too many color choices

Here's how you select track color in some DAWs just using the mouse:

1. Click color picker button
2. Visually locate desired color (which is pretty easy as the color selection is small)
3. Move mouse to desired color
4. Release mouse button

In FL Studio:

1. Middle-click thing
2. Move mouse to color picker button
3. Click color picker button
4. Visually locate desired color (which can take a few seconds as the color selection is bigger)
5. Move mouse to desired color
6. Click color
7. Move mouse to Accept button
8. Click Accept button
9. Move mouse to ✓ button
10. Click ✓ button

My proposed solution? See below mock-up. A curated selection of colors defined by the user and a way to pick colors with a single click.

Color picker mock-up.png

And here is how it works:
How it works.png

Picking colors with a singe click:

1. MMB click track/channel/etc to show picker. Do not release MMB yet!
2. Move mouse over to desired color preset.
3. Release MMB to use preset under mouse and automatically close color picker.

Easier way to dismiss pop-up

Note also the text in the dashed box: Clicking (with any mouse button) anywhere outside the color picker pop-up cancels and closes the pop-up. I requested this in 2014 and Gol was super cool about it and implemented it but only for the MMB because of some technical difficulty. I'm requesting this again in case things have changed as, IMO, this would be worth giving a shot. I wrote an AutoHotkey script to dismiss FL pop-ups by clicking outside the pop-up. It basically sends an Escape keystroke to the pop-up, which programmatically is a bit of a botch, but it shows it's doable.

How to edit color presets

This is very easy to do, simply MMB click any one of the presets to bring up the full-blown Color Selector, select the color you want or type in its RGB value, click Accept—done.

You can also right-click anywhere in the color presets area to show a small context menu where the user can choose from a bunch of "stock" color picker palette preset. Stock color picker palette presets can also be browsed and loaded using MMB from the FL browser just like plugin presets, and are stored as individual files on disk, again, like plugin presets. Any preset files placed in the same folder as the stock preset files will show up in the color presets area context menu, for easy selection.

In addition, two items are available:

Export... Saves current custom color picker palette to file for backup and sharing
Load custom... Loads a saved custom color picker palette.

The color palette is applied globally, not as part of the project, i.e. it is an FL global setting.

One more thing...

The "Preset colors" tab, which shows basically the old color palette... is anybody actually going to use it now that we have the much better "Hue box" and "Hue circle"? IMO the old picker is the least helpful/inspiring selection of colors ever put together. If this tab was removed I for one wouldn't miss it.

Thanks for reading and stay safe!
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Last edited by Scoox on Sat Jun 06, 2020 9:43 am, edited 12 times in total.


D3Mens
Thu May 21, 2020 8:54 am

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Re: FL 20.7 new color picker is overcomplicated.

Totally agree with you. I was really happy abou...

Scoox
Fri May 22, 2020 9:14 pm

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Re: FL 20.7 new color picker is overcomplicated.

In case anyone cares, I've updated the mock-up ...


Scoox
Sat May 23, 2020 7:41 pm

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Re: FL 20.7 new color picker is overcomplicated.

About the random color button (dice button), I'...
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Scoox
Sun May 24, 2020 6:51 pm

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Re: FR: A simpler color picker (the brand-new FL 20.7 color picker still too complicated)

"Set color/icon/both based on name" does what i...
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