ColorSense for Xcode

Overview

ColorSense is an Xcode plugin that makes working with UIColor (and NSColor) more visual.

There are many tools that allow you to insert a UIColor/NSColor from a color picker or by picking a color from the screen. But once you’ve inserted it, it can be hard to remember which color you’re actually looking at in your code because you basically just have a series of numbers.

This is where ColorSense comes in: When you put the caret on one of your colors, it automatically shows the actual color as an overlay, and you can even adjust it on-the-fly with the standard Mac OS X color picker.

The plugin also adds some items to the Edit menu to insert colors and to disable color highlighting temporarily. These menu items have no keyboard shortcuts by default, but you can set them via the system’s keyboard preferences (Xcode’s own preferences won’t show them).

Watch Demo Video (YouTube)

I’m @olemoritz on Twitter.

Installation

Simply build the Xcode project and restart Xcode. The plugin will automatically be installed in ~/Library/Application Support/Developer/Shared/Xcode/Plug-ins. To uninstall, just remove the plugin from there (and restart Xcode).

If you get a “Permission Denied” error while building, please see this issue.

This is tested on OS X 10.8 with Xcode 4.4.1 and 4.5.

Limitations

• It only works for constant colors, something like [UIColor colorWithWhite:foo * bar + 1 alpha:baz] won’t work.

• Only RGB (colorWithRed:green:blue:alpha:), grayscale (colorWithWhite:alpha:), and named colors (redColor…) are supported at the moment (no HSB or CMYK).

License

Copyright (c) 2012, Ole Zorn
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this
  list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
  this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
  and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

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