Hex Marks the Spot

Your screen is a treasure map, and every color on it is treasure. X marks the spot; here, hex does.

Hex Marks the Spot is a color picker that lives in your menu bar. Point at any pixel, click, and its color code is on your clipboard, ready to paste into your code, your design file or a message.

MARK ANY SPOT ON YOUR SCREEN • Click the eyedropper in the menu bar, or press Control-Option-9 in any app. • A zoomed magnifier shows the pixels around your pointer, enlarged with a grid and a live color code, so you land on exactly the pixel you mean. • Press Escape or right-click to call off the search. • The picked color is copied automatically in the format you choose. Rather copy by hand? Switch it off.

TEN FORMATS, TWO AT A TIME HEX with or without #, RGB values, RGB percentages, CSS rgb(), CSS hsl(), HSB, CMYK, SwiftUI Color and NSColor. Choose your two favorites: both sit one above the other, each with its own copy button, so switching formats takes one click.

EVERY COLOR, CHARTED • Tints, shades and a saturation sweep of the current color. Click any of them to use it. • Triadic, analogous and complementary harmonies, one click away. • Dial in a color by hand with RGB, HSB or CMYK sliders.

EVERY PICTURE HIDES A PALETTE Drop a picture onto the Palettes page and Hex Marks the Spot hauls out its main colors, anywhere from 2 to 12. Name the palette and keep it. Or build one by hand: collect colors on the scratchpad, then turn them into a palette. Share any palette as plain text that anyone can read.

CAN EVERYONE READ IT? THE CONTRAST CHECKER Will this text be readable on that background? See the contrast ratio and the four WCAG grades (AA and AAA, for normal and large text) before you commit a color to a design.

A TREASURE CHEST FOR YOUR FINDS Every color you pick goes into your history, the ship's log. Keep the real treasures with a heart, stage colors on the scratchpad, and find all your palettes in one place.

KEEPS WATCH FROM THE MENU BAR • Lives in the menu bar. The Dock icon is optional. • Control-Option-0 opens the window from any app. • Right-click the menu bar icon for your most recent colors. • Keep the window on top while you work, and launch at login if you like.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN Everything stays on your Mac. Your screen is never recorded, nothing is sent anywhere, and there is no account. The zoomed magnifier needs the macOS Screen Recording permission to read the pixels around your pointer; the app explains why and shows you how to allow it. Without it, you can still pick colors with the basic system picker.

Happy hunting, me hearties.

One-time purchase. No subscription, no in-app purchases.

Discovery signals