Photoshop Tip: Color picking from anywhere

Here's a quick Photoshop CS3 tip to sample colors from applications other than Photoshop:

1. With a Photoshop document open, click on the color swatch/color chooser in the tools pallette to open up the color picker.
2. Mouse over the Photoshop document so that the eyedropper tool becomes visible.
3. Left-click your mouse in the Photoshop document and continue to hold the mouse button down.
4. You can now move your mouse outside of the Photoshop document and sample colors from anywhere on your computer screen!
5. Release your mouse button when you have found the color you desire.
   
6. The sampled color is now the selected color in your color picker! Be sure to have the "Only Web Colors" checkbox unchecked to allow a wider gamut of colors to be sampled.
   

Note: This will only sample colors from what is visible on your screen. It will not allow you to move windows to find colors on a 'buried' screen. Be sure to set up your workspace so that the open Photoshop document and whatever your color sample source will be are both visible.

Flash Heat Mapping

I've been working on a widget-like application at the office for about a month now, creating an application that collects data from users and displays it as a heat map.

We're expecting this to be a part of a great portal we're currently designing. This will be one of the 'sticky' parts of the portal contents that allows our readers to take a stab at where the market is going to be in the future. It displays the current Foreign Exchange pair pricing and will allow you to guess what tomorrow's high and low will be. Then, it will map the answers as a heat map on the interface to display the accuracy.

Here's some preliminary screen shots:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

MarsEdit

I'm testing a few blog publishing platforms these days. The first on the list is MarsEdit - a Mac specific platform for publishing, editing, and overall management of blogs.



So far, the experience has been pretty good in my tests. I'll be interested to see the flexibility of it as I move forward. We have a need at GFT to blog on a daily basis and we are evaluating software to help us accomplish that.

AIRFare AIR Application

My old friends Joe Jonston and Christian Saylor - both of Universal Mind - have been working on an AIR application called AIRFare that is a flight and hotel lookup app using data services from Kayak. Joe has been knee deep into the Experience design of the application and created a couple of videos of his progress:

You can also follow Joe's progress at his blog at www.merhl.com

DemographicMapping

I've been working on a very cool little application at work over the past few days. It is a mapping application leveraging the Yahoo! AS3 mapping API in Flex 3. We needed an application to be able to view a regional snapshot of our account activity over a given time period. We new the following data:

• account address
• account value
• age
• gender

First had to get the geocodes for all the addresses but found plenty of places to do that. So, here we are with a spreadsheet of almost 5,000 people and couldn't find an easy to use online application to display them.

Enter Flex.

I built the application in Flex 3 using Yahoo!'s api. It was a fairly easy workflow with the Yahoo! classes. Although, I would have liked to have seen the code for the classes from Yahoo! to see how some things were put together that I was extending. The plotting of the points was straightforward but kind of cluttered when you have so many of them in a small area.

Enter filtering.

I created a way to filter by general region of the globe, gender, age, and account value. This helped to narrow down the field of view quite a bit, but there was no way to direct focus on a particular are of the map - no way to see all of the accounts in Chicago for example.

Enter Zones.

At any time you can drop a 'zone' on the map. What the zone does is aggregate the data in a given geographical radius from the center of the zone. This way, you can explore the details of an area and have a summary of what's going on in the area. The zone becomes active after it is dropped and moved or it's size adjusted.

After the completion of the web based app, I decided it would be valuable to create an AIR version. This way, the data could be swapped out for a new data set by simply selecting a new document. I used a tab deliminated text file for the data source but that could easily be swapped out for another format later. I was considering releasing it as a public application at some point and adding customization features like:

• select a data file and choose what columns to plot data against
• customize the filtering based on the data
• customize the zone details based on the date
• save the 'file settings' as a favorite for recall later or to use with multiple files of the same format

Anyway, fun stuff and very valuable for what we needed!

Cool Design Publication

I've stumbled upon a very cool publication on web design and development. Its called WebDesigner and its published in England. It has some really great articles on how to execute the latest and greatest in web techniques. Most of the technology how-to's focus on Adobe products - Flash, Flex, Photoshop - but they also cover some Silverlight projects.

They have some great portfolio sections as well, showcasing some great designs across the web. You can check them out online at www.webdesignermag.co.uk I've been able to pick up copies on the newsstand at Barnes & Noble in the computer or art sections.