APP REVIEW: EyeDrop.me

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about Apple’s built-in color utility. It’s certainly a great utility and with the few upgrades I did (such as adding a hex color picker), it has become a valuable asset to my daily work flow.

Continuing on that theme, I came across EyeDrop.me, which, in many ways, compliments that article because of its color picker features, and what makes this app really stand out in my mind is the way it works.

Let me paint a picture for you: imagine you are on your favorite iOS device browsing the internet for the latest and greatest website. You notice how much you really like the color palette on that website. Unfortunately, since you are on an iOS device, you can’t just Option-click and view the source of the page to see what colors they are using (not to mention how long it would take you to sift through all that code to collect each color).

EyeDrop.me to the rescue.

All you have to do is copy the web address into the app, click ‘Pull Colors’, and BAM — now you have every color that webpage uses in a nice and neat palette. From there, you can choose which colors you like best and add them to a saved list. With your favorite colors picked, you can now see their hex and RGB values for immediate implementation into your project. You can also tweak the RGB values from within the app incase you like the color but don’t love it.

Once you have the colors set the way you want them, you can export the palette by connecting to Photoshop (haven’t tried that one yet) or via email as an Adobe ASE file or an HTML email.

However, there are some features that I’d love to see added. Someone mentioned in the comments in the iTunes store that it would be great to save your palettes locally on the device. It makes perfect sense because you don’t always want to use them right away, and personally, I don’t want to sift through old emails to find that palette I liked last month. I’m also hoping to see Kuler integration at some point.

General edibility would be nice as well — I want to be able to delete swatches I’ve added.(Maybe this is already there, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to do it.) Finally, if I can modify the colors within the app, I would like to see some color theory introduced. For example, you like this one color and you want to know its accented analogic colors. Currently, you have to load up some other webpage or app and put in the color value to get the info you want. Adding in the ability to create color schemes based off the colors you are saving would make this app very complete.

If I had to put a star rating on the EyeDrop.me app, I would have to say it is a solid four stars. It functions great minus the ability to delete saved swatches and if they were to add those few extras features, I believe this would be a one-stop shop for generating color palettes on your iOS device.

Surprisingly, it is free and there isn’t a single ad on there to clutter your view. To me, that means the developers of this app are committed to the community since they aren’t making money on this thing (which warms my heart).

I highly suggest everyone that is into design work check out the EyeDrop.me app. I think you will be pleasantly surprised, and it won’t cost you a dime. Don’t forget to leave your feedback for the developers; hopefully they’ll listen.