Picker

A native macOS menu-bar color picker with Liquid Glass.

Grab any pixel on screen, read it as HEX / RGB / HSL, and keep a palette of everything you've sampled.

  

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What it does

Picker lives in your menu bar. Click it, hit Pick a Color, and your cursor becomes a magnified loupe — line up the exact pixel you want anywhere on screen and click. The color drops into the app instantly, ready to copy and saved to your palette.

Features

• Magnified-pixel sampling — the native loupe magnifies the screen pixel-by-pixel, so you grab the exact one every time.
• Liquid Glass — a real macOS 26 glass panel, not a mockup.
• HEX · RGB · HSL — every format at once; click a value to copy it and the icon flips to a checkmark.
• Saved palette — a running strip of every color you grab. Click a chip to copy, hover to delete, scroll the row with your mouse wheel.
• Readable on any color — the text ink switches between black and white by perceived brightness, so the hex stays legible on reds, blues, and dark tones where naive luminance gets it wrong.
• Out of the way — no dock icon, no window clutter, one menu-bar click away.
• Zero dependencies — a single Swift package, ad-hoc signed.

Requirements

• macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later — Liquid Glass and the loupe need the macOS 26 SDK
• Xcode 26 / Swift 6.2 to build

Build & run

git clone https://github.com/Entrepenulian/Picker.git
cd Picker
./build.sh            # compiles and assembles build/Picker.app
open build/Picker.app # launches the menu-bar agent

An eyedropper appears in your menu bar:

• Left-click it to open the panel.
• Right-click it to quit.

To make it Spotlight-launchable, drag build/Picker.app into /Applications.

How it's built

Picker is a compact SwiftUI + AppKit app with no third-party code:

• Shell — a borderless, non-activating NSPanel anchored under an NSStatusItem, hosting SwiftUI through NSHostingController. Running its own panel instead of MenuBarExtra keeps the glass open while you sample.
• Glass — SwiftUI's glassEffect for the panel surface and the primary button.
• Sampling — NSColorSampler, the same magnified loupe Apple's own color picker uses.
• Contrast — ink chosen by YIQ perceived brightness (0.299·R + 0.587·G + 0.114·B), which keeps white text on saturated and dark colors.
• Persistence — the palette is JSON in UserDefaults.

Sources/Picker/
├── App.swift           # NSStatusItem + floating panel + sampling
├── PanelView.swift     # the whole UI: hero card, formats, palette
├── Model.swift         # PickedColor, the store, color math
├── DesignSystem.swift  # tokens: ink, spacing, radii, motion
└── ColorSampler.swift  # NSColorSampler wrapper

License

MIT — see LICENSE.