Pika For Mac

Development and design are difficult enough, so the last thing you want to waste time and money on is a color picker. The right tool will save you a lot of the former, and a free, open-source one will save you all of the latter.

Pika is a completely free, open-source color picker that seems to tick all the right boxes. It is extremely easy to use, written in Swift for optimal performance and integration, and offers all the features you need without making things too complicated.

Quite a lot, but not too much. As you can see from the UI, it is designed to help you pick foreground and background colors, and then extract color codes in one of the supported formats: Hex, RGB, HSB, and HSL.

The app also calculates the contrast ratio and lets you know if the colors you have selected are compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You will have everything you need in a tiny window on your desktop, thus keeping context switching to a minimum.

To start with, you need to select a global hotkey to bring up the main window. You can also just click the menu bar icon if you prefer. Once the Pika window is visible, click the eyedropper or press ⌘D / ⇧⌘D to pick the foreground or background color.

Once you've selected your colors, and you're happy with the contrast ratio and WCAG compliance, you can copy them to the clipboard in either the default format or any other format you prefer.

It would be helpful to have a global shortcut for picking background or foreground colors directly, without having to bring up the app's main window first. If you don't want to have it on your desktop at all times, this could save you a click or a couple of key presses.

Pika hasn't been around for very long, and it is being improved at a rapid pace. If you feel it's not perfect for you yet, you can either wait for a new version or visit the project's GitHub page to provide suggestions or contribute directly.