Lion’s Broken Color Picker

One of two mystifying downgrades that come with OS X Lion / Mountain Lion* is the fact that all traces of hex values have been removed from the Digital Colorimeter. For hundreds of thousands of web developers, obtaining hex values is the only purpose of Colorimeter, and I suspect that web developers are the bundled app’s main users. This one is a total head-scratcher. Hopefully the change is a bug, not a feature, and it’ll be back someday.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a workable free replacement, check out this simple Colors app. Not quite as elegant, but gets the job done just fine.

color-picker-os-x-lion

* The other mystifying downgrade in Mountain Lion is the “snooze” feature in iCal alerts. You used to be able to set a snooze to be re-reminded a few hours later, or the day before, or whatever you like. Now your only option is to acknowledge the alert and dismiss it, so the daily GTD workflow for bazillions of users is completely broken. What went through the heads of the designers removing this critical feature is anyone’s guess.

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