Previewing NSColors
Many of you probably know about this already but for those who don’t, here’s a nifty little tidbit for you developers.
NSColor has all those methods to retrieve system colors. Wouldn’t it be nice to see what they actually are? Bring up a color panel (doesn’t matter which app), select the color list icon (it should be the 3rd icon) up top. In the “List” pop-up, select “Developer”.
What you get is a list of colors with NSColor’s method names. In addition, it seems to update if you change your color scheme in System Preferences.
Not that this clears up all questions. Still not sure where those purple “knob” colors appear.
Category: Cocoa, OS X, Programming 4 comments »
November 8th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
Nice tip!
I still wish that the cocoa documentation had a swatch next to methods such as +[NSColor controlShadowColor] and family.
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:16 pm
BTW, I believe the old licensed Pantone color lists from NeXTSTEP/OpenStep still work.
January 25th, 2007 at 3:45 am
Knob colors are found in some Pro apps, like Motion. They are the virtually the only colors the same between the Developer pallete and the AquaPro pallete (which may not be installed if you don’t have any of Apple’s pro apps.)
April 7th, 2012 at 6:38 am
Great tip, helped me identify the selected row colour in Finder. Thanks!