seperate color picker

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Jon Hobbs

Posted on Oct 20, 2005 (permalink)

Hi,

I have a project which requires me to use a color picker and I wondered if there was any way of using the one in RAD editor without using the editor itself ? I need it to open in a pop-up window and when the user clicks a color it would close the window and put the hex value in a textbox.

If this isn't possible, do you plan to bring out a seperate color picker control at any point ?

Jon

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Telerik Admin
Posted on Oct 20, 2005 (permalink)

Hi Jon,

Please, find attached a sample ColorPicker similar to the one that r.a.d.editor uses. It is nothing fancy and the code is not the best we have produced.

To deploy it, you should place the ColorPicker.ascx and the images in the ColorPicker directory and to compile the project. You can use the color picker from the provided ColorPickerForm.aspx file.

Please note that we do not usually provide support for code modifications for this sample color picker.

We have plans to introduce a full-scale color picker in our r.a.d.controls suite. It is one of the new products in the ToDo list for next year.

We hope we were helpful.

Sincerely yours,
Steve
the telerik team

www.telerik.com | www.sharepointcontrols.com | www.sitefinity.com | www.mcmscontrols.com
Attached files
- 004969_ColorPicker.zip
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Jon Hobbs

Posted on Oct 20, 2005 (permalink)

thanks guys, as incredibly helpful as ever :)

Jon

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Jon Hobbs

Posted on Oct 21, 2005 (permalink)

hi guys,

I know you don't offer support for this kind of thing but just incase you're feeling charitable or bored on a friday afternoon I thought i's ask. Is there any way of switching on the "custom color picker" which looks like a generic windows control , that's the bit we really needed.

Sorry to be a pain.

Jon

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Telerik Admin

Posted on Oct 24, 2005 (permalink)

We are sorry, Jon, but we cannot help you with your request. In case you need a fancier color-picker, we will suggest to review www.asp.net - you can find some nice controls there.

You may also use the ActiveX functionality, which IE offers. This way you will be able to get a Windows like color picker. However this approach will not work on Mozilla/FireFox.

All the best,

Robert
the telerik team

www.telerik.com | www.sharepointcontrols.com | www.sitefinity.com | www.mcmscontrols.com

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Janet H

Posted on Oct 28, 2005 (permalink)

Thank you for providing the ColorPicker code.

I am currently using r.a.d Editor 5.x. The ColorPicker provided looks quite different, is it an older version? Will there be any code sample for the color picker that matches the one used on version 5.x?

I am also trying to use the Editor/Controls/ColorPicker.ascx that's included in the trial download, by drop and drop into my aspx page. It gives javascript errors that DropDownMenu and ColorPicker are undefined. Where can I find the functions for these 2 javascript objects in the trial example code?

Thanks very much,

Janet

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Telerik Admin

Posted on Oct 28, 2005 (permalink)

Hello Janet,

We do not plan to provide sample for a new one because we have plans to introduce a full-scale color picker in our r.a.d.controls suite sometime next year. Note that we do not usually provide support for the color picker or any code modifications made to it (it comes as it is).

Please edit the one we have attached in this thread to suit your needs.

Kind Regards,
Steve
the telerik team

www.telerik.com | www.sharepointcontrols.com | www.sitefinity.com | www.mcmscontrols.com

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Todd Anglin Master

Posted on Nov 4, 2005 (permalink)

I sounds like Telerik has the right idea, but I just want STRONGLY urge your team to produce the Color Picker tool.

I've been searching the web for at least week comparing every color picker out there. None of them provide a good user experience, and those that come close are usually poorly implemented.

It's too bad this control isn't in the upcoming Q4 release, but I'm keeping my figers crossed for a Q1 release? The sooner the better 'cause then I don't have to waste money on someone elses junky control...

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Telerik Admin

Posted on Nov 4, 2005 (permalink)

Hello Todd,

Thank you for the kind words. Once we decide to release it as a separate control it will be noted in our RoadMap so customers can be prepared for it. In the meantime we are collecting input so please feel free to give us suggestions on how you want it to work and look.

Thank you for your interest.

Best wishes,
Steve
the telerik team

www.telerik.com | www.sharepointcontrols.com | www.sitefinity.com | www.mcmscontrols.com

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Todd Anglin Master

Posted on Feb 22, 2006 (permalink)

Just to keep this discussion alive, I wanted to update on the Color Picker I ended up using (in the absence of a telerik colorpicker, of course!).

The picker that offered the best combination of a "simple" picker for users that aren't that particular and an intuitive "advanced" picker for user looking for the exact color was Web Color Picker by InnovaStudio.

It's not perfect (especially if you're using some complex CSS to style your site- it can cause the picker to offset incorrectly from the button element), but it looks better than almost any other picker on web and it is very approachable (in the sense it doesn't throw 256 colors at the user and say 'pick one'). On top of all of that, the price is hard to beat...

I would still much prefer to use a color picker by Telerik since the support from InnovaStudio is sub-par. But if y'all need a good example to get the creative juices flowing, this is it!

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Telerik Admin

Posted on Feb 23, 2006 (permalink)

Hi Todd,

Thank you for the kind words and heads up. We have logged the link and will definitely review it when the time comes. Your telerik points have been updated for the involvement.

Thank you for the continuous patronage guys!

Best wishes,
Steve
the telerik team

www.telerik.com | dnn.telerik.com | www.sharepointcontrols.com | www.sitefinity.com | www.mcmscontrols.com

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Mike Bridge

Posted on Jun 14, 2006 (permalink)

I'm keeping the flame alive. I, too, still dream of a Telerik colour selector. One that is a full-fledged ASP.Net control and which runs cross-browser. One that makes the other colour-selector authors cry alone in their parents' basements.

...Not that I'm bitter about the general quality of Colour Selector controls.

-Mike

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davidr

Posted on Aug 14, 2006 (permalink)

Bumping this too. Not sure why almost a year later and 3 quarters later they haven't implemented a color picker. I've looked on web still and there is a lot of crappy ones out there. And one that I did find was soso, requires a dialog box. I'd be interested to see one that can be a control that could be on a dialogbox or on non-popup/non-dialogbox webpage. Telerik your products are good! but please work on the color picker!!!

Thanks,

David

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Todd Anglin Master

Posted on Aug 14, 2006 (permalink)

David,

Thanks for revisiting this idea. I'm glad to see there is still interest in the community for the telerik colorpicker! While we wait on telerik to add colorpicker to the Road Map, check out the InnovaStudio Web Color Picker I linked to above. It is one of the best looking and most usable (from the user side, not the developer side) color pickers on the web. It's priced very reasonably, too.

I'm with you, though; the sooner the better for a telerik color picker. Innova's support is not that great and they definitely don't have the community of users. To keep the discussion open, are there any features that you specifically would want to see in a telerik colorpicker?

Thanks~

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davidr

Posted on Aug 14, 2006 (permalink)

Would be nice if they had built in a color sample label or something so when the use selects a color it shows them a sample of it. and a popup like a dropdownlist on the same webpage instead of a dialogbox would be cool too. Todd, is Innova Studio WYSIWYG Editor required to get the color picker tha they have? Because they mention is being required on the link
http://www.innovastudio.com/colorpicker.asp where they metion a download example of setting background and foreground. Is this just for the example its required, or do you have to purchase both?

David

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Todd Anglin Master

Posted on Aug 14, 2006 (permalink)

David,

You do not need the editor (at least you didn't when I purchased about 6 - 8 months ago). I do remember the examples showing the editor, though. You should be able to buy just the color picker for about $35 (if I remember correctly). It implements as some JS code that you have put in your page and a reference to their JS file (located in the ColorPicker directory that you install in your web application).

It's not a .NET control, so it's definitely not as easy as configuring a web server control. But it does look better than any .NET based color picker I could find. Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks~

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Mike Bridge

Posted on Aug 14, 2006 (permalink)

Has anyone seen one which allows you to set the colours in code? I want to be able to display different colours for each user, but when I evaluated colour selectors six months or so ago, only the QuickWebSoft selector had this capability (but I had some other unrelated problems with that one which kept me from adopting it).

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Bryan Andrews

Posted on Sep 21, 2006 (permalink)

http://demo.qooxdoo.org/html/example/ColorSelector_1.html

Something like this will be best.

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John Cardinal

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

I too need a colour selector and just did the rounds and couldn't find a really suitable one.

In the perfect world it would be an asp.net control, it could be implmented in a rad window to popup and return the selected color or linked to a specific edit control to set it's text property with the colour selected.

In fact what I actually need to do with it is insert it as an editor in a RadGrid, this is a common scenario in my projects where a user will create their own status items and one of the properties is the colour it displays in.

For example if the status is urgent then they might select red for it and in other areas of the program it will display the object set to Urgent status as red etc. This means there should be a color picker editor for a grid column built into the Telerik components in addition to a more stand alone one used to select a colour in a regular form field.

Perhaps something along the lines of the datepicker where you can use it alone or plunk it down on a form and refer to it in a grid template column so that only one instance of the picker is required on the form.

It's all too late for me right now, I need something today, I'll go through what others have posted here and see if I can find something suitable that I can shoe-horn into a grid.

I hope Telerik decides to get back to their roots at some point and start fleshing out their existing controls such as more editors for the grid etc because it seems the focus has been lost in those areas judging by the age of this thread and others.

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John Cardinal

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Just to keep this discussion alive, I wanted to update on the Color Picker I ended up using (in the absence of a telerik colorpicker, of course!).

The picker that offered the best combination of a "simple" picker for users that aren't that particular and an intuitive "advanced" picker for user looking for the exact color was Web Color Picker by InnovaStu

Todd suggested this product, I just checked and they have no live demo to try it out and Opera is not list as supported which is a requirement for us as we want to support FF, IE and Opera so just a heads up for others.

Others I have looked at are:

This is an asp.net web server control and inexpensive as well:
http://www.my-server.net/Controls/ColorChooser/

This one is free and is perhaps the most beautiful one of any of them but doesn't appear to work with FireFox
http://simplythebest.net/scripts/DHTML_scripts/javascripts/
javascript_115.html

This one is also free, often referenced to people searching for a colour picker and is an asp.net control, however it comes with other items built into it's library:
http://www.filespace.co.uk/adrian/WebControls.aspx

This is also and asp.net component and is free:
http://xult.org/stuff/colorpicker.aspx

This one is stands out as being perhaps the best asp.net control with the best cross browser support and low cost, my only knock on it is that it's not the most visually appealing but tastes vary:
http://www.mycolorpicker.com/

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Todd Anglin Master

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

John,

Thanks for the interesting perspective on the color picker. I don't think I've seen anyone suggest grid integration before, but your scenario makes sense. We'll just have to see what telerik does if they decide to build this control.

In the mean time, you have a chance to let them know what you think is important by taking their ASP.NET Products Survey (the link should be available on your Client.net page). Telerik usually spends the most time where the community displays the most demand, so your input will help shape the future releases.

Let's just hope that includes a color picker. =)

Thanks~

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Mike Bridge

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

The one feature that all these controls are lacking (unless I missed something in the documentation) is the ability to set the colours on-the-fly. As far as I can tell, these are all hardcoded sets of colours.

I'm hoping that the potential Telerik control will allow me to set different colours in code for each instantiation.

-Mike

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John Cardinal

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Mike, by setting colours on the fly you mean setting the pallette that pops up or can be selected from?

What I find kind of odd and may just be my ignorance of Javascript is why so many of these colour pickers have little boxes or areas that each seem to be a clickable element. I'm wondering why a more mathematical approach and a static picture arent' used, i.e. the days of the web safe colour palette are long behind us, why not just have a groovy image of some kind showing a nice mix of millions of colours and use math to determine the click point on the image and calculate the colour selected.

That way you have one single image / control with a single mouse event for each event you want to track like click and move etc and no worries about pallets. Or even a math routine that generates the image on the fly so you can still have pallettes without all the little boxes to be clicked into.

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Todd Anglin Master

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Mike,

That's true. Telerik would be leading the way if they offered that kind of support in a color picker. The InnovaStudio color picker does allow you to easily add custom colors to the simple picker using the client side API, but you still have the "default" colors to contend with.

In the mean time, have you considered using a templated combobox? You could easily define a list of colors and build a templated drop down that just displays the colors you define. You could bind the combobox to a different color list for each user and save their selections. It's probably not as pretty as a "real" color picker, but it should get the job done if you have a relatively small list of colors.

Just a thought...

Thanks~

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Todd Anglin Master

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

John,

To your latest point on why we like palettes: they are much easier for the "average user" to work with.

When I was looking for a good color picker, I'd ask my (very average user) wife to try a color picker and let me know her thoughts. She found the pickers that offered "groovy" images with millions of colors overwhelming and frustrating because she couldn't find the simple color that she wanted.

Unless you're building an application for designers or people who care a lot about getting the perfect color, most people don't need (or want) millions of colors. That's what's nice about InnovaStudio, it offers a basic picker for the average user and an advanced picker with many more colors (the 216 non-dithering colors). It would be nice, perhaps, if they added another tab on the advanced picker that allowed really picky users to select a color from the 16 million possible values.

Hopefully that makes sense. If you have any doubt, try conducting some of your own casual usability studies with average users and see what they say. The results may surprise you... =)

Thanks~

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John Cardinal

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi Todd, that makes sense about the palette.
In the same vein I contemplated the idea of using a combo to select colours as well, however for the same reason I'm wary of doing it:
In my app I'm making an asp.net UI for an existing winform UI that's already out and in use. In the winform UI the user can select from a basic palette of colours but also do the advanced selection for pretty much any colour.

They are stored as ARGB values in a database and so I need to replicate this behaviour in asp.net.

I think though that in the interests of saving time and the hope that Telerik has something down the road I'm just going to go the combo box route with a prefilled list of every .net colour gathered through reflection and just add any existing colours that the users might have chosen that don't match closely with any existing .net colour as "custom".

Something along the lines of this idea:
http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/DotNet/Tools/Colors/default.aspx

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Todd Anglin Master

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

John,

That looks like a fair approach. I'd suggest that you look at using combobox as your drop down control, though. It has multicolumn support, so you could have the .NET color names in one column and a cell filled with the color in the other column. That would give your users a better idea of what a color looks like before making a selection.

Sorry about the InnovaStudio demo-less site. I mentioned it before in this thread, but I there support is less than great (they don't even have their product help docs online!). There used to be online demos that you could play with, but I couldn't find any today. The color is just some simple JS and HTML, though, so it should work with Opera just fine (if that was your main concern). If I find a demo of the control floating somewhere on the web, I'll update this thread so others can get a hands-on. I don't know why Innova doesn't do this; seems silly...

Thanks~

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Mike Bridge

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi John,

Sorry, I wasn't being too clear with my description. By 'on-the-fly', I mean I want to be able to set them on a per-instance basis. In other words, I want the ability to query a database (or xml file, or whatever) for colour values and potentially create a different palette for each instance control.

The closest I've come to this is the QuickWebSoft colorpicker, but it requires hardcoded---wait a minute, they have a new version on their web site. Just a second.... :)

-Mike

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Mike Bridge

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Never mind---it's still the same version. I thought by "user-defined color palette" they were meaning end-users.
> The closest I've come to this is the QuickWebSoft colorpicker, but it requires hardcoded---wait a minute, they have a new version on their web site. Just a second....

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John Cardinal

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi Mike, just wanted to clarify that in case Telerik decides someday to go through this thread when coming up with a design for a colour picker.

I looked at the QuickWebSoft picker and while it looks very nice they have completely insane pricing. I make software that is sold globally to over 50 countries and there are still a surprising number of companies that price their products based on the IMNSHO outdated concept of per domain pricing. This won't fly with a product that is sold to be used in thousands of domains.

That was why we initially passed on Telerik until they came to their senses fairly recently and clarified their licensing. As a small company with a product that sells for a relatively low price I can't afford to even consider a single component that is hundreds of dollars when there are so many cheaper alternatives out there. However for a single web site I can see their component being a good alternative.

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John Cardinal

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi Mike, just wanted to clarify that in case Telerik decides someday to go through this thread when coming up with a design for a colour picker.

I looked at the QuickWebSoft picker and while it looks very nice they have completely insane pricing. I make software that is sold globally to over 50 countries and there are still a surprising number of companies that price their products based on the IMNSHO outdated concept of per domain pricing. This won't fly with a product that is sold to be used in thousands of domains.

That was why we initially passed on Telerik until they came to their senses fairly recently and clarified their licensing. As a small company with a product that sells for a relatively low price I can't afford to even consider a single component that is hundreds of dollars when there are so many cheaper alternatives out there. However for a single web site I can see their component being a good alternative.

Reply
John Cardinal

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi Mike, just wanted to clarify that in case Telerik decides someday to go through this thread when coming up with a design for a colour picker.

I looked at the QuickWebSoft picker and while it looks very nice they have completely insane pricing. I make software that is sold globally to over 50 countries and there are still a surprising number of companies that price their products based on the IMNSHO outdated concept of per domain pricing. This won't fly with a product that is sold to be used in thousands of domains.

That was why we initially passed on Telerik until they came to their senses fairly recently and clarified their licensing. As a small company with a product that sells for a relatively low price I can't afford to even consider a single component that is hundreds of dollars when there are so many cheaper alternatives out there. However for a single web site I can see their component being a good alternative.

Reply
John Cardinal

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi Mike, just wanted to clarify that in case Telerik decides someday to go through this thread when coming up with a design for a colour picker.

I looked at the QuickWebSoft picker and while it looks very nice they have completely insane pricing. I make software that is sold globally to over 50 countries and there are still a surprising number of companies that price their products based on the IMNSHO outdated concept of per domain pricing. This won't fly with a product that is sold to be used in thousands of domains.

That was why we initially passed on Telerik until they came to their senses fairly recently and clarified their licensing. As a small company with a product that sells for a relatively low price I can't afford to even consider a single component that is hundreds of dollars when there are so many cheaper alternatives out there. However for a single web site I can see their component being a good alternative.

Reply
John Cardinal

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi Mike, just wanted to clarify that in case Telerik decides someday to go through this thread when coming up with a design for a colour picker.

I looked at the QuickWebSoft picker and while it looks very nice they have completely insane pricing. I make software that is sold globally to over 50 countries and there are still a surprising number of companies that price their products based on the IMNSHO outdated concept of per domain pricing. This won't fly with a product that is sold to be used in thousands of domains.

That was why we initially passed on Telerik until they came to their senses fairly recently and clarified their licensing. As a small company with a product that sells for a relatively low price I can't afford to even consider a single component that is hundreds of dollars when there are so many cheaper alternatives out there. However for a single web site I can see their component being a good alternative.

Reply
John Cardinal

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi Mike, just wanted to clarify that in case Telerik decides someday to go through this thread when coming up with a design for a colour picker.

I looked at the QuickWebSoft picker and while it looks very nice they have completely insane pricing. I make software that is sold globally to over 50 countries and there are still a surprising number of companies that price their products based on the IMNSHO outdated concept of per domain pricing. This won't fly with a product that is sold to be used in thousands of domains.

That was why we initially passed on Telerik until they came to their senses fairly recently and clarified their licensing. As a small company with a product that sells for a relatively low price I can't afford to even consider a single component that is hundreds of dollars when there are so many cheaper alternatives out there. However for a single web site I can see their component being a good alternative.

Reply
Mike Bridge

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi Todd,

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't know whether I could make it work well for our situation. One of the specific use-cases I have is allow a user to upload a header logo, then select some colours that will more-or-less co-ordinate with it. Right now, we get a lot of support calls from our clients wondering what colours will go with their logo. The way I would like this process to go is this:

1) A user uploads his company logo.
2) A histogram of the image is created and the top 16 colours (say), plus some border colours are stored.
3) When the user selects a "background colour" or "sidebar colour" for his web page, it will present him with these colours, plus a standard colour palette. In an ideal world, I'd put these on two separate tabs of a popup dialogue, e.g. "My Colours" and "Standard Colours".

Thanks,

-Mike

> In the mean time, have you considered using a templated combobox

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Mike Bridge

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi John,

Yes, in addition to the technical problems we had with their colour picker when we tried to do things that were a bit outside what it was designed for, the pricing scheme is a little odd. However, their support was very responsive (given the time-delay between China and me).

The thing I like about it (and the thing I hope will be considered for a potential Telerik version) is the idea of multiple, customizable tabs.

-Mike

> I looked at the QuickWebSoft picker and while it looks very nice they have completely insane pricing.

Reply
Todd Anglin Master

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Mike,

That sounds like a neat idea. Have you already figured out how to do the histogram part? I'd be curious to see how well a histogram could discern the key colors in a logo, especially if the user has a logo with gradients. My background is more design that it is code, so I may be overly skeptical of an algorithms ability to pick out the right colors vs. having the user explicitly state the key color(s) in their logo (via color picker) and working from there to calculate a complementary palette.

I hope your project goes well. If you have a working demo of your color calculation control that we can look at in the future, definitely let us know!

Thanks~

Reply
Mike Bridge

Posted on Oct 10, 2006 (permalink)

Hi Todd,

It is relatively straightforward to create the histogram for an arbitrary image type, but it works best for GIF files. Fortunately, GIFs are what most of our clients upload , so it works fairly well in our situation.

As for images with gradients, I had planned to address that once I found a colour-picker, so I could actually deploy it :). I haven't looked at it closely, but I assume the algorithm would try to group colours into "hills" and select the colours that are closest to the peaks. (The suggestion has been made to take the histogram by converting a JPG to GIF first, but in practice, this didn't work very well.) But even if we restrict its use to GIFs, it will be an advance for us.

The code I have for this is only of proof-of-concept/alpha quality yet (and not very efficient), but if we go ahead and develop it further it I'd be happy to contribute it.

-Mike

> That sounds like a neat idea. Have you already figured out how to do the histogram part? I'd be curious to see how well a histogram could discern the key colors in a logo, especially if the user has a logo with gradients.

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dcardine

Posted on Nov 13, 2007 (permalink)

by any chance is this still happening?

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Telerik Admin

Posted on Nov 14, 2007 (permalink)

Hi Bryan,

You can check our RadColorPicker which is part of the "Prometheus" suite and is built upon the ASP.NET AJAX framework. I hope the new control will meet your requirements.

Greetings,
Georgi Tunev
the telerik team

www.telerik.com | dnn.telerik.com | www.sharepointcontrols.com | www.sitefinity.com | www.mcmscontrols.com

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